Podcasts about marxists

On Monday's Mark Levin Show, those exploiting the MAGA movement for personal gain have been exposed. These fake MAGA figures, like Chatsworth Qatarlson (Tucker Carlson), are grifting, lying, and promoting anti-American sentiments while falsely claiming to support America First. They support regimes like Iran and Qatar, which funded terrorism and undermined U.S. interests. Fake MAGA is very upset that their team, Iran, is losing. They want you to believe that patriotism is isolationism. The choice is between real MAGA and fake MAGA. Later, Minister of Strategic Affairs of Israel Ron Dermer calls in to provide an update on the Israel/Iran war.  The highly successful operation targeted Iran's military nuclear program and missile capabilities. Dermer praises the precision of Israel's pilots and intelligence, noting the elimination of key terror figures in the operation's opening minutes, and expresses confidence in achieving Israel's strategic goals. By confronting Iran, both Israel's and America's futures are being secured. Also, President Trump issued a statement expressing regret that Iran did not sign a nuclear deal he had urged them to accept, calling it a shame and a waste of human life. He emphasized, in all caps, that "IRAN CANNOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON," a stance he has consistently reiterated throughout his political career. He is a non-interventionist commander-in-chief who avoids conflict when possible but is prepared to act decisively to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. We, in real MAGA, real American patriots, stand with Trump, our military, and our Israeli allies! Whatever is happening, we should strongly support our president and our troops, pray for them, speak out for them, and condemn any of the fake MAGA grifters, Marxists, Islamists, and the rest who seek to undermine our country especially at a time like this.  President Trump has made clear that he wants peace, and that the Iranian regime with nuclear weapons is not about peace but genocide.  For the vast majority of Americans, nothing could be clearer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Donald Trump is back in Washington, DC, returning early from the Group of 7 leaders' summit in Canada, posting and commenting about the ongoing military conflict between Israel and Iran, including he wants 'better than a ceasefire', "I have not reached out to Iran for “Peace Talks” in any way, shape, or form", calling that Fake News, and on Iran's Supreme Leader, "We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now"; U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco hears oral argument in Newsom v. Trump, case where Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is challenging President Trump's deployment of National Guard troops in response to immigration protests with the governors' consent. We will talk about it with The Hill's Legal Affairs Reporter Zach Schoenfeld (23); Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) deletes social media posts in which he blamed Democrats and Marxists for the fatal shooting of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the wounding of another lawmaker and his wife; latest on proposed Medicaid changes in the Senate Republican version of the budget reconciliation bill – the one big beautiful bill – which are different than the House-passed version. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have, over time, allowed the marxists to infiltrate the Democratic Party.

This week on the Mark Levin Show, Democrats and the media are at it again, supporting violent riots, arson, and attacks on law enforcement in California, while labeling President Trump as authoritarian. A coalition of illegal aliens, Islamists, and Marxists are burning American flags, engaging in violence, and demanding to stay in America while causing this chaos. No, Mark did not lobby President Trump on Iran policy, despite what the fake news is saying. The President knows Mark's stance on Iran, which aligns with Trump and MAGA – prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Outlets like Politico are spreading false narratives and propaganda, particularly from isolationists and Iranian sympathizers. Mark is not leading a lobbying campaign of "GOP hawks." Iran, and isolationist ideologies are major threats. DNI Tulsi Gabbard's stance on nuclear war and her revisionism about the U.S. defeating Imperial Japan under Harry Truman are grotesque. Gabbard, the Quincy Institute, and people like Chatsworth Qatarlson (Tucker Carlson) are emboldening Iran's regime by signaling American weakness. Sen Alex Padilla barging into a Kristi Noem press conference shows a pattern of violent, lawless behavior by Democrats. Democrats reflect their violent base and their violent base represents Democrats. Padilla could have coordinated with Noem instead of causing this show. The Democrat Party is a Marxist party that represents Islamists, antisemites, Stalinists, and criminals. They've given up on the American citizens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Wednesday's Mark Levin Show, Iran, and isolationist ideologies are major threats. DNI Tulsi Gabbard's stance on nuclear war and her revisionism about the U.S. defeating Imperial Japan under Harry Truman are grotesque. Gabbard, the Quincy Institute, and people like Chatsworth Qatarlson (Tucker Carlson) are emboldening Iran's regime by signaling American weakness.  Despite the fake news, Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, and moral clarity is demanded against the Islamo-Nazi regime in Tehran. Prudent, fact-driven foreign policy is essential, with a commitment to hold misleading media and ideologues accountable. Later, the media ignored the funding behind the L.A. riots by Marxists and Islamists while promoting revolutionary rhetoric from protesters claiming indigenous rights and advocating socialism. Immigration should prioritize American citizens, not illegal immigrants. Also, a federal judge in Newark, New Jersey, appointed by Joe Biden, ruled that the Trump administration cannot detain Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil is not a student but a Hamas supporter who violated his immigration status by promoting a terrorist organization's agenda and engaging in efforts to undermine the U.S. and attack Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Send us a textCanadian political strategist Warren Kinsella joins Eylon Levy to expose the orchestrated information war being waged against Israel and the West. Kinsella reveals the deep coordination behind the anti-Israel protest movement, the shocking role of Iran and Qatar in Western institutions, and how the West has been manipulated into embracing antisemitic propaganda as moral virtue.In this eye-opening conversation:- Iran's fingerprints on the global protest network- The unholy alliance of Islamists and Marxists targeting Israel- How Qatar bought its way into American academia- Why Gen Z equates opposing Israel with fighting racism- The media collapse that let Hamas fill the vacuum- What Israel must do to start winning the information warFeaturing insights from Kinsella's upcoming book The Hidden Hand, this episode is a must-watch for anyone seeking to understand how Israel lost the narrative—and what it will take to win it back. 00:00 – Introduction: Why the West turned on Israel 03:00 – How Iran hijacked the global protest movement 08:00 – Gen Z's radicalization and Iran's strategic genius 18:00 – The media collapse and Hamas's social media machine 21:00 – How Israel lost a generation in the West 27:00 – The CBC's descent and why Western media failed 30:00 – The unholy alliance: Islamists and the radical left 31:30 – Final thoughts: confronting the hidden handSupport the showStay up to date at:X: https://twitter.com/stateofapodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/stateofapod/

On Monday's Mark Levin Show, Democrats and the media are at it again, supporting violent riots, arson, and attacks on law enforcement in California, while labeling President Trump as authoritarian. A coalition of illegal aliens, Islamists, and Marxists are burning American flags, engaging in violence, and demanding to stay in America while causing this chaos.  Trump's deployment of the National Guard and Marines to address these riots is appropriate and lawful – Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H. Bush all used military forces in crises. These are not mostly peaceful protests, it's totally violent. These attacks were on federal law enforcement officers. Federal prosecution for assaults on federal officers is supported by 18 USC Section 111. Democrats will never clean up this mess because they created it - they want illegal aliens and Marxists here. That creates chaos and violence and destroys our governing system so they can fundamentally transform it. Also, Sen Tom Cotton calls in and defends Trump's use of federal authority to address the L.A. riots. Trump is acting within his legal rights to federalize the National Guard when local authorities, such as Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, fail to control violence involving arson, looting, and attacks by illegal aliens.  Cotton criticizes Democrats and the media for portraying Trump's actions as authoritarian while ignoring the lawlessness and supporting the rioters' political causes.  He also addressed Iran's rejection of a nuclear proposal from Trump. The offer was generous, allowing Iran access to low-enriched uranium for civilian nuclear power, similar to what other countries receive. However, Iran's refusal suggests their true intent is to develop nuclear weapons, as enriching uranium to any level could lead to weapons-grade material. Later, a mural at Falafel Inc. in Fairfax County, Virginia is allegedly glorifying violent extremism and promoting anti-American symbolism.  The artwork in the restaurant depicts a man in a keffiyeh, rowing toward the U.S. Capitol with a two-finger “victory” salute and a Palestinian flag amid rubble. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did communists hijack America's racial justice movements? Former Communist Party insider Manning Johnson thought so—and he had the receipts. In this episode, we are talking about Johnson's 1958 book, Color, Communism, and Common Sense, to explore how racial division was weaponized by Marxists to destabilize the U.S. capitalistic system and where we see the residue of these ideas working today. Read Baldwin's article: https://www.centerforbiblicalunity.com/post/the-real-cause-of-racial-conflict

LA Councilwoman Traci Park delivers a fiery “no” on the city budget, slamming it for failing on homelessness and public safety. Tom exposes deep divisions in LA politics, including Karen Bass and the Marxists who are destroying Los Angeles.

Andy Marx — who Phil and David both first met on the WGA picket lines — is an award-winning writer, photographer and musician and a wonderful storyteller with an amazing story to tell. For one thing, he's Hollywood royalty in film, comedy and music as a “nepo grandbaby.” Just for starters, Andy's two grandfathers were the legendary Groucho Marx of The Marx Brothers and the legendary songwriter Gus Kahn whose classic songs you will hear about here, as well as lots of stories for all the comedy Marxists, too. To learn more about building community through food and "Somebody Feed the People," visit the Philanthropy page at philrosenthalworld.com

In this episode Xi Van Fleet discusses the American Marxists and how the left weaponizes the goodness of the American people. Xi discusses the need for us to educate the American people about Communism, so we do not go down the same path of destruction of the country she left. Xi is a true American Patriot, and you can purchase her book Mao's America-A Survivor's Warning anywhere you can buy books. VanMeterforVirginia.com Music-Scott Buckley-Monomyth, The Fury

On Tuesday's Mark Levin Show, an Egyptian national, illegally in the U.S. allegedly attacked Jewish Americans, including a Holocaust survivor, in Boulder, Colorado.  The Biden administration's lax vetting and work permit issuance enabled this incident. How many people do we have like this in America? Immigration should benefit American citizens, who decide who enters and why. Immigrants must respect and contribute to the country or leave. It's not for importing Islamists, Marxists, criminals, spies, or anti-Semites.  Also, several questions come to mind on the published reports of an Iran deal. How do we know the Iranians will reveal all enrichment sites and enriched material to this consortium?  Will we have access to their country to inspect anywhere we wish?  Won't the Iranians play along for a few years and then, after the initial period and after the Trump presidency is over, thumb its nose at the world and breakout?  Later, Sen Ted Cruz calls in to discuss the Democrats and federal judges who hare undermining the Constitution and the rule of law. Democrats are supporting lawless rouge judges who issue nationwide injunctions to block the Trump administration's agenda. He also criticizes Democrats for hypocrisy, pointing to their silence when mobs protested at Supreme Court justices' homes and their attacks on justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Afterwards, Mark contrasts Alexander Hamilton's vision of a strong central government with Jefferson and Madison's preference for limited federal power and strong state authority. Hamilton's ideas, like a lifelong executive and senators, were rejected by most framers, who favored state-centric governance, as Madison emphasized in Federalist 45. Hamilton's support for implied powers (Federalist 33) appeals to modern advocates of activist government.  Finally, Miranda Devine calls in to discuss Anthony Bernal, Jill Biden's chief of staff, who played a role in concealing Joe Biden's cognitive decline during his presidency. Described as Jill's “work husband,” Bernal is portrayed as a powerful, behind-the-scenes figure who wielded enormous influence in the White House. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Monday's Mark Levin Show, open borders, radicalized college campuses, and biased media drive cultural decay in the U.S. Unvetted immigration from conflict zones, homegrown terrorism fueled by media misrepresentation, and Marxist indoctrination in universities are key issues. A Marxist allegedly killed two people in D.C. weeks ago and now an Egyptian illegal immigrant allegedly tried to kill people protesting Hamas in Boulder, Colorado, with Molotov cocktails. Biden's policies worsened these problems, and outlets like CNN and the New York Times spread Hamas propaganda, such as false claims of Israeli attacks. Later, colleges and universities have been destroyed by Islamists, Marxists, and foreign influences like Qatar, Iran, and Hamas, with Jews being targeted in a manner reminiscent of the 1930s. These groups, supported by the Democrat Party, media, and courts, are anti-American and aim to collapse the system. Also, President Trump forcefully posted about Iran – “The AUTOPEN should have stopped Iran a long time ago from “enriching.” Under our potential Agreement — WE WILL NOT ALLOW ANY ENRICHMENT OF URANIUM!” He may have posted this as a response to leakers claiming there's a deal that allows Iran to enrich uranium. These leaks might come from the fifth column isolationists or Iranian sympathizers within the administration aiming to undermine Trump.  Afterward, the United States is among the most religiously tolerant nations, with the Constitution ensuring freedoms for all, regardless of beliefs. Faith acts as a moral foundation, moderating behavior and fostering societal civility, even influencing non-believers through surrounding values. Christianity does not seek political control, in contrast to political Islam, which aims for centralized authority over society and government. Without an enlightenment embracing individual liberty, Islam's dominant establishment often supports Islamism, which clashes with Western values.  Importing such ideologies into the U.S. may lead to resistance against assimilation, as seen in parts of Europe and emerging in America.  In Addition, George Washington University's Program on Extremism details how Hamas established early ties with Iran through meetings led by Mousa Abu Marzook, a key Hamas figure, while he was a student in the U.S. in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Marzook, who later became Deputy Chief of Hamas's Political Bureau, orchestrated these connections from American soil. These ties, formalized during a 1991 Tehran meeting, laid the groundwork for Iran's long-term backing of Hamas, including advanced knowledge of Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Can you imagine what's going on today? Finally, Steve Moore calls in and highlights the economy's strong performance in the second quarter, citing a Federal Reserve estimate of 4.6% GDP growth, a significant rebound from the negative 0.2% in the first quarter under Biden. He notes low inflation at under 2.5%, compared to Biden's average of 6%, and emphasizes rising personal income and consumer spending. Moore credits these improvements to the early days of Trump's presidency, countering media predictions of economic collapse. He also stresses the urgency of making Trump's tax cuts permanent to avoid a historic tax increase, which Moore says would cost the average family $2,500 annually. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, we talk more about Lyndon LaRouche and the Marxists that never were, and David tries to cajole Madeline into saying a slur (Madeline does NOT).PATREON:https://www.patreon.com/c/pickmeupimscared/postsSOURCES: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/10/26/larouches-call-to-quarantine-aids-victims-trails-in-california/f79e0d33-02be-4fad-a643-08bf0d462f95/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00806R000100640021-7.pdfhttps://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2022/10/14/conference-build-the-new-paradigm-defeat-green-fascism/https://archive.org/details/larouchenewamericanfascismhttps://larouchepub.com/pr/2022/20221102_hinkle.htmlhttps://web.archive.org/web/20110713184401/http://larouchewatch.com/ugliest-larouche-rant.pdfhttps://www.cosmonautmag.com/2025/04/praxis-of-alienation-and-enmity-on-the-american-communist-party/

Is China hell-bent on a move against Taiwan, or does its saber-rattling not square with a military capability that's perhaps overestimated? Frank Dikötter, a Hoover senior fellow specializing in the history of modern China, joins Hoover senior fellows Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster to discuss his reading of China's desire and ability to project power, including its manufacturing capability and its suppression of individual liberties, plus the durability of Xi Jinping's rule. Recorded on May 23, 2025.

Yesterday, the self-styled San Francisco “progressive” Joan Williams was on the show arguing that Democrats need to relearn the language of the American working class. But, as some of you have noted, Williams seems oblivious to the fact that politics is about more than simply aping other people's language. What you say matters, and the language of American working class, like all industrial working classes, is rooted in a critique of capitalism. She should probably read the New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy's excellent new book, Capitalism and its Critics, which traces capitalism's evolution and criticism from the East India Company through modern times. He defines capitalism as production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets, encompassing various forms from Chinese state capitalism to hyper-globalization. The book examines capitalism's most articulate critics including the Luddites, Marx, Engels, Thomas Carlisle, Adam Smith, Rosa Luxemburg, Keynes & Hayek, and contemporary figures like Sylvia Federici and Thomas Piketty. Cassidy explores how major economists were often critics of their era's dominant capitalist model, and untangles capitalism's complicated relationship with colonialism, slavery and AI which he regards as a potentially unprecedented economic disruption. This should be essential listening for all Democrats seeking to reinvent a post Biden-Harris party and message. 5 key takeaways* Capitalism has many forms - From Chinese state capitalism to Keynesian managed capitalism to hyper-globalization, all fitting the basic definition of production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets.* Great economists are typically critics - Smith criticized mercantile capitalism, Keynes critiqued laissez-faire capitalism, and Hayek/Friedman opposed managed capitalism. Each generation's leading economists challenge their era's dominant model.* Modern corporate structure has deep roots - The East India Company was essentially a modern multinational corporation with headquarters, board of directors, stockholders, and even a private army - showing capitalism's organizational continuity across centuries.* Capitalism is intertwined with colonialism and slavery - Industrial capitalism was built on pre-existing colonial and slave systems, particularly through the cotton industry and plantation economies.* AI represents a potentially unprecedented disruption - Unlike previous technological waves, AI may substitute rather than complement human labor on a massive scale, potentially creating political backlash exceeding even the "China shock" that contributed to Trump's rise.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full TranscriptAndrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A couple of days ago, we did a show with Joan Williams. She has a new book out, "Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back." A book about language, about how to talk to the American working class. She also had a piece in Jacobin Magazine, an anti-capitalist magazine, about how the left needs to speak to what she calls average American values. We talked, of course, about Bernie Sanders and AOC and their language of fighting oligarchy, and the New York Times followed that up with "The Enduring Power of Anti-Capitalism in American Politics."But of course, that brings the question: what exactly is capitalism? I did a little bit of research. We can find definitions of capitalism from AI, from Wikipedia, even from online dictionaries, but I thought we might do a little better than relying on Wikipedia and come to a man who's given capitalism and its critics a great deal of thought. John Cassidy is well known as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He's the author of a wonderful book, the best book, actually, on the dot-com insanity. And his new book, "Capitalism and its Critics," is out this week. John, congratulations on the book.So I've got to be a bit of a schoolmaster with you, John, and get some definitions first. What exactly is capitalism before we get to criticism of it?John Cassidy: Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question, Andrew. Obviously, through the decades, even the centuries, there have been many different definitions of the term capitalism and there are different types of capitalism. To not be sort of too ideological about it, the working definition I use is basically production for profit—that could be production of goods or mostly in the new and, you know, in today's economy, production of services—for profit by companies which are privately owned in markets. That's a very sort of all-encompassing definition.Within that, you can have all sorts of different types of capitalism. You can have Chinese state capitalism, you can have the old mercantilism, which industrial capitalism came after, which Trump seems to be trying to resurrect. You can have Keynesian managed capitalism that we had for 30 or 40 years after the Second World War, which I grew up in in the UK. Or you can have sort of hyper-globalization, hyper-capitalism that we've tried for the last 30 years. There are all those different varieties of capitalism consistent with a basic definition, I think.Andrew Keen: That keeps you busy, John. I know you started this project, which is a big book and it's a wonderful book. I read it. I don't always read all the books I have on the show, but I read from cover to cover full of remarkable stories of the critics of capitalism. You note in the beginning that you began this in 2016 with the beginnings of Trump. What was it about the 2016 election that triggered a book about capitalism and its critics?John Cassidy: Well, I was reporting on it at the time for The New Yorker and it struck me—I covered, I basically covered the economy in various forms for various publications since the late 80s, early 90s. In fact, one of my first big stories was the stock market crash of '87. So yes, I am that old. But it seemed to me in 2016 when you had Bernie Sanders running from the left and Trump running from the right, but both in some way offering very sort of similar critiques of capitalism. People forget that Trump in 2016 actually was running from the left of the Republican Party. He was attacking big business. He was attacking Wall Street. He doesn't do that these days very much, but at the time he was very much posing as the sort of outsider here to protect the interests of the average working man.And it seemed to me that when you had this sort of pincer movement against the then ruling model, this wasn't just a one-off. It seemed to me it was a sort of an emerging crisis of legitimacy for the system. And I thought there could be a good book written about how we got to here. And originally I thought it would be a relatively short book just based on the last sort of 20 or 30 years since the collapse of the Cold War and the sort of triumphalism of the early 90s.But as I got into it more and more, I realized that so many of the issues which had been raised, things like globalization, rising inequality, monopoly power, exploitation, even pollution and climate change, these issues go back to the very start of the capitalist system or the industrial capitalist system back in sort of late 18th century, early 19th century Britain. So I thought, in the end, I thought, you know what, let's just do the whole thing soup to nuts through the eyes of the critics.There have obviously been many, many histories of capitalism written. I thought that an original way to do it, or hopefully original, would be to do a sort of a narrative through the lives and the critiques of the critics of various stages. So that's, I hope, what sets it apart from other books on the subject, and also provides a sort of narrative frame because, you know, I am a New Yorker writer, I realize if you want people to read things, you've got to make it readable. Easiest way to make things readable is to center them around people. People love reading about other people. So that's sort of the narrative frame. I start off with a whistleblower from the East India Company back in the—Andrew Keen: Yeah, I want to come to that. But before, John, my sense is that to simplify what you're saying, this is a labor of love. You're originally from Leeds, the heart of Yorkshire, the center of the very industrial revolution, the first industrial revolution where, in your historical analysis, capitalism was born. Is it a labor of love? What's your family relationship with capitalism? How long was the family in Leeds?John Cassidy: Right, I mean that's a very good question. It is a labor of love in a way, but it's not—our family doesn't go—I'm from an Irish family, family of Irish immigrants who moved to England in the 1940s and 1950s. So my father actually did start working in a big mill, the Kirkstall Forge in Leeds, which is a big steel mill, and he left after seeing one of his co-workers have his arms chopped off in one of the machinery, so he decided it wasn't for him and he spent his life working in the construction industry, which was dominated by immigrants as it is here now.So I don't have a—it's not like I go back to sort of the start of the industrial revolution, but I did grow up in the middle of Leeds, very working class, very industrial neighborhood. And what a sort of irony is, I'll point out, I used to, when I was a kid, I used to play golf on a municipal golf course called Gotts Park in Leeds, which—you know, most golf courses in America are sort of in the affluent suburbs, country clubs. This was right in the middle of Armley in Leeds, which is where the Victorian jail is and a very rough neighborhood. There's a small bit of land which they built a golf course on. It turns out it was named after one of the very first industrialists, Benjamin Gott, who was a wool and textile industrialist, and who played a part in the Luddite movement, which I mention.So it turns out, I was there when I was 11 or 12, just learning how to play golf on this scrappy golf course. And here I am, 50 years later, writing about Benjamin Gott at the start of the Industrial Revolution. So yeah, no, sure. I think it speaks to me in a way that perhaps it wouldn't to somebody else from a different background.Andrew Keen: We did a show with William Dalrymple, actually, a couple of years ago. He's been on actually since, the Anglo or Scottish Indian historian. His book on the East India Company, "The Anarchy," is a classic. You begin in some ways your history of capitalism with the East India Company. What was it about the East India Company, John, that makes it different from other for-profit organizations in economic, Western economic history?John Cassidy: I mean, I read that. It's a great book, by the way. That was actually quoted in my chapter on these. Yeah, I remember. I mean, the reason I focused on it was for two reasons. Number one, I was looking for a start, a narrative start to the book. And it seemed to me, you know, the obvious place to start is with the start of the industrial revolution. If you look at economics history textbooks, that's where they always start with Arkwright and all the inventors, you know, who were the sort of techno-entrepreneurs of their time, the sort of British Silicon Valley, if you could think of it as, in Lancashire and Derbyshire in the late 18th century.So I knew I had to sort of start there in some way, but I thought that's a bit pat. Is there another way into it? And it turns out that in 1772 in England, there was a huge bailout of the East India Company, very much like the sort of 2008, 2009 bailout of Wall Street. The company got into trouble. So I thought, you know, maybe there's something there. And I eventually found this guy, William Bolts, who worked for the East India Company, turned into a whistleblower after he was fired for finagling in India like lots of the people who worked for the company did.So that gave me two things. Number one, it gave me—you know, I'm a writer, so it gave me something to focus on a narrative. His personal history is very interesting. But number two, it gave me a sort of foundation because industrial capitalism didn't come from nowhere. You know, it was built on top of a pre-existing form of capitalism, which we now call mercantile capitalism, which was very protectionist, which speaks to us now. But also it had these big monopolistic multinational companies.The East India Company, in some ways, was a very modern corporation. It had a headquarters in Leadenhall Street in the city of London. It had a board of directors, it had stockholders, the company sent out very detailed instructions to the people in the field in India and Indonesia and Malaysia who were traders who bought things from the locals there, brought them back to England on their company ships. They had a company army even to enforce—to protect their operations there. It was an incredible multinational corporation.So that was also, I think, fascinating because it showed that even in the pre-existing system, you know, big corporations existed, there were monopolies, they had royal monopolies given—first the East India Company got one from Queen Elizabeth. But in some ways, they were very similar to modern monopolistic corporations. And they had some of the problems we've seen with modern monopolistic corporations, the way they acted. And Bolts was the sort of first corporate whistleblower, I thought. Yeah, that was a way of sort of getting into the story, I think. Hopefully, you know, it's just a good read, I think.William Bolts's story because he was—he came from nowhere, he was Dutch, he wasn't even English and he joined the company as a sort of impoverished young man, went to India like a lot of English minor aristocrats did to sort of make your fortune. The way the company worked, you had to sort of work on company time and make as much money as you could for the company, but then in your spare time you're allowed to trade for yourself. So a lot of the—without getting into too much detail, but you know, English aristocracy was based on—you know, the eldest child inherits everything, so if you were the younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, you actually didn't inherit anything. So all of these minor aristocrats, so major aristocrats, but who weren't first born, joined the East India Company, went out to India and made a fortune, and then came back and built huge houses. Lots of the great manor houses in southern England were built by people from the East India Company and they were known as Nabobs, which is an Indian term. So they were the sort of, you know, billionaires of their time, and it was based on—as I say, it wasn't based on industrial capitalism, it was based on mercantile capitalism.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the beginning of the book, which focuses on Bolts and the East India Company, brings to mind for me two things. Firstly, the intimacy of modern capitalism, modern industrial capitalism with colonialism and of course slavery—lots of books have been written on that. Touch on this and also the relationship between the birth of capitalism and the birth of liberalism or democracy. John Stuart Mill, of course, the father in many ways of Western democracy. His day job, ironically enough, or perhaps not ironically, was at the East India Company. So how do those two things connect, or is it just coincidental?John Cassidy: Well, I don't think it is entirely coincidental, I mean, J.S. Mill—his father, James Mill, was also a well-known philosopher in the sort of, obviously, in the earlier generation, earlier than him. And he actually wrote the official history of the East India Company. And I think they gave his son, the sort of brilliant protégé, J.S. Mill, a job as largely as a sort of sinecure, I think. But he did go in and work there in the offices three or four days a week.But I think it does show how sort of integral—the sort of—as you say, the inheritor and the servant in Britain, particularly, of colonial capitalism was. So the East India Company was, you know, it was in decline by that stage in the middle of the 19th century, but it didn't actually give up its monopoly. It wasn't forced to give up its monopoly on the Indian trade until 1857, after, you know, some notorious massacres and there was a sort of public outcry.So yeah, no, that's—it's very interesting that the British—it's sort of unique to Britain in a way, but it's interesting that industrial capitalism arose alongside this pre-existing capitalist structure and somebody like Mill is a sort of paradoxical figure because actually he was quite critical of aspects of industrial capitalism and supported sort of taxes on the rich, even though he's known as the great, you know, one of the great apostles of the free market and free market liberalism. And his day job, as you say, he was working for the East India Company.Andrew Keen: What about the relationship between the birth of industrial capitalism, colonialism and slavery? Those are big questions and I know you deal with them in some—John Cassidy: I think you can't just write an economic history of capitalism now just starting with the cotton industry and say, you know, it was all about—it was all about just technical progress and gadgets, etc. It was built on a sort of pre-existing system which was colonial and, you know, the slave trade was a central element of that. Now, as you say, there have been lots and lots of books written about it, the whole 1619 project got an incredible amount of attention a few years ago. So I didn't really want to rehash all that, but I did want to acknowledge the sort of role of slavery, especially in the rise of the cotton industry because of course, a lot of the raw cotton was grown in the plantations in the American South.So the way I actually ended up doing that was by writing a chapter about Eric Williams, a Trinidadian writer who ended up as the Prime Minister of Trinidad when it became independent in the 1960s. But when he was younger, he wrote a book which is now regarded as a classic. He went to Oxford to do a PhD, won a scholarship. He was very smart. I won a sort of Oxford scholarship myself but 50 years before that, he came across the Atlantic and did an undergraduate degree in history and then did a PhD there and his PhD thesis was on slavery and capitalism.And at the time, in the 1930s, the link really wasn't acknowledged. You could read any sort of standard economic history written by British historians, and they completely ignored that. He made the argument that, you know, slavery was integral to the rise of capitalism and he basically started an argument which has been raging ever since the 1930s and, you know, if you want to study economic history now you have to sort of—you know, have to have to address that. And the way I thought, even though the—it's called the Williams thesis is very famous. I don't think many people knew much about where it came from. So I thought I'd do a chapter on—Andrew Keen: Yeah, that chapter is excellent. You mentioned earlier the Luddites, you're from Yorkshire where Luddism in some ways was born. One of the early chapters is on the Luddites. We did a show with Brian Merchant, his book, "Blood in the Machine," has done very well, I'm sure you're familiar with it. I always understood the Luddites as being against industrialization, against the machine, as opposed to being against capitalism. But did those two things get muddled together in the history of the Luddites?John Cassidy: I think they did. I mean, you know, Luddites, when we grew up, I mean you're English too, you know to be called a Luddite was a term of abuse, right? You know, you were sort of antediluvian, anti-technology, you're stupid. It was only, I think, with the sort of computer revolution, the tech revolution of the last 30, 40 years and the sort of disruptions it's caused, that people have started to look back at the Luddites and say, perhaps they had a point.For them, they were basically pre-industrial capitalism artisans. They worked for profit-making concerns, small workshops. Some of them worked for themselves, so they were sort of sole proprietor capitalists. Or they worked in small venues, but the rise of industrial capitalism, factory capitalism or whatever, basically took away their livelihoods progressively. So they associated capitalism with new technology. In their minds it was the same. But their argument wasn't really a technological one or even an economic one, it was more a moral one. They basically made the moral argument that capitalists shouldn't have the right to just take away their livelihoods with no sort of recompense for them.At the time they didn't have any parliamentary representation. You know, they weren't revolutionaries. The first thing they did was create petitions to try and get parliament to step in, sort of introduce some regulation here. They got turned down repeatedly by the sort of—even though it was a very aristocratic parliament, places like Manchester and Leeds didn't have any representation at all. So it was only after that that they sort of turned violent and started, you know, smashing machines and machines, I think, were sort of symbols of the system, which they saw as morally unjust.And I think that's sort of what—obviously, there's, you know, a lot of technological disruption now, so we can, especially as it starts to come for the educated cognitive class, we can sort of sympathize with them more. But I think the sort of moral critique that there's this, you know, underneath the sort of great creativity and economic growth that capitalism produces, there is also a lot of destruction and a lot of victims. And I think that message, you know, is becoming a lot more—that's why I think why they've been rediscovered in the last five or ten years and I'm one of the people I guess contributing to that rediscovery.Andrew Keen: There's obviously many critiques of capitalism politically. I want to come to Marx in a second, but your chapter, I thought, on Thomas Carlyle and this nostalgic conservatism was very important and there are other conservatives as well. John, do you think that—and you mentioned Trump earlier, who is essentially a nostalgist for a—I don't know, some sort of bizarre pre-capitalist age in America. Is there something particularly powerful about the anti-capitalism of romantics like Carlyle, 19th century Englishman, there were many others of course.John Cassidy: Well, I think so. I mean, I think what is—conservatism, when we were young anyway, was associated with Thatcherism and Reaganism, which, you know, lionized the free market and free market capitalism and was a reaction against the pre-existing form of capitalism, Keynesian capitalism of the sort of 40s to the 80s. But I think what got lost in that era was the fact that there have always been—you've got Hayek up there, obviously—Andrew Keen: And then Keynes and Hayek, the two—John Cassidy: Right, it goes to the end of that. They had a great debate in the 1930s about these issues. But Hayek really wasn't a conservative person, and neither was Milton Friedman. They were sort of free market revolutionaries, really, that you'd let the market rip and it does good things. And I think that that sort of a view, you know, it just became very powerful. But we sort of lost sight of the fact that there was also a much older tradition of sort of suspicion of radical changes of any type. And that was what conservatism was about to some extent. If you think about Baldwin in Britain, for example.And there was a sort of—during the Industrial Revolution, some of the strongest supporters of factory acts to reduce hours and hourly wages for women and kids were actually conservatives, Tories, as they were called at the time, like Ashley. That tradition, Carlyle was a sort of extreme representative of that. I mean, Carlyle was a sort of proto-fascist, let's not romanticize him, he lionized strongmen, Frederick the Great, and he didn't really believe in democracy. But he also had—he was appalled by the sort of, you know, the—like, what's the phrase I'm looking for? The sort of destructive aspects of industrial capitalism, both on the workers, you know, he said it was a dehumanizing system, sounded like Marx in some ways. That it dehumanized the workers, but also it destroyed the environment.He was an early environmentalist. He venerated the environment, was actually very strongly linked to the transcendentalists in America, people like Thoreau, who went to visit him when he visited Britain and he saw the sort of destructive impact that capitalism was having locally in places like Manchester, which were filthy with filthy rivers, etc. So he just saw the whole system as sort of morally bankrupt and he was a great writer, Carlyle, whatever you think of him. Great user of language, so he has these great ringing phrases like, you know, the cash nexus or calling it the Gospel of Mammonism, the shabbiest gospel ever preached under the sun was industrial capitalism.So, again, you know, that's a sort of paradoxical thing, because I think for so long conservatism was associated with, you know, with support for the free market and still is in most of the Republican Party, but then along comes Trump and sort of conquers the party with a, you know, more skeptical, as you say, romantic, not really based on any reality, but a sort of romantic view that America can stand by itself in the world. I mean, I see Trump actually as a sort of an effort to sort of throw back to mercantile capitalism in a way. You know, which was not just pre-industrial, but was also pre-democracy, run by monarchs, which I'm sure appeals to him, and it was based on, you know, large—there were large tariffs. You couldn't import things in the UK. If you want to import anything to the UK, you have to send it on a British ship because of the navigation laws. It was a very protectionist system and it's actually, you know, as I said, had a lot of parallels with what Trump's trying to do or tries to do until he backs off.Andrew Keen: You cheat a little bit in the book in the sense that you—everyone has their own chapter. We'll talk a little bit about Hayek and Smith and Lenin and Friedman. You do have one chapter on Marx, but you also have a chapter on Engels. So you kind of cheat. You combine the two. Is it possible, though, to do—and you've just written this book, so you know this as well as anyone. How do you write a book about capitalism and its critics and only really give one chapter to Marx, who is so dominant? I mean, you've got lots of Marxists in the book, including Lenin and Luxemburg. How fundamental is Marx to a criticism of capitalism? Is most criticism, especially from the left, from progressives, is it really just all a footnote to Marx?John Cassidy: I wouldn't go that far, but I think obviously on the left he is the central figure. But there's an element of sort of trying to rebuild Engels a bit in this. I mean, I think of Engels and Marx—I mean obviously Marx wrote the great classic "Capital," etc. But in the 1840s, when they both started writing about capitalism, Engels was sort of ahead of Marx in some ways. I mean, the sort of materialist concept, the idea that economics rules everything, Engels actually was the first one to come up with that in an essay in the 1840s which Marx then published in one of his—in the German newspaper he worked for at the time, radical newspaper, and he acknowledged openly that that was really what got him thinking seriously about economics, and even in the late—in 20, 25 years later when he wrote "Capital," all three volumes of it and the Grundrisse, just these enormous outpourings of analysis on capitalism.He acknowledged Engels's role in that and obviously Engels wrote the first draft of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 too, which Marx then topped and tailed and—he was a better writer obviously, Marx, and he gave it the dramatic language that we all know it for. So I think Engels and Marx together obviously are the central sort of figures in the sort of left-wing critique. But they didn't start out like that. I mean, they were very obscure, you've got to remember.You know, they were—when they were writing, Marx was writing "Capital" in London, it never even got published in English for another 20 years. It was just published in German. He was basically an expat. He had been thrown out of Germany, he had been thrown out of France, so England was last resort and the British didn't consider him a threat so they were happy to let him and the rest of the German sort of left in there. I think it became—it became the sort of epochal figure after his death really, I think, when he was picked up by the left-wing parties, which are especially the SPD in Germany, which was the first sort of socialist mass party and was officially Marxist until the First World War and there were great internal debates.And then of course, because Lenin and the Russians came out of that tradition too, Marxism then became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union when they adopted a version of it. And again there were massive internal arguments about what Marx really meant, and in fact, you know, one interpretation of the last 150 years of left-wing sort of intellectual development is as a sort of argument about what did Marx really mean and what are the important bits of it, what are the less essential bits of it. It's a bit like the "what did Keynes really mean" that you get in liberal circles.So yeah, Marx, obviously, this is basically an intellectual history of critiques of capitalism. In that frame, he is absolutely a central figure. Why didn't I give him more space than a chapter and a chapter and a half with Engels? There have been a million books written about Marx. I mean, it's not that—it's not that he's an unknown figure. You know, there's a best-selling book written in Britain about 20 years ago about him and then I was quoting, in my biographical research, I relied on some more recent, more scholarly biographies. So he's an endlessly fascinating figure but I didn't want him to dominate the book so I gave him basically the same space as everybody else.Andrew Keen: You've got, as I said, you've got a chapter on Adam Smith who's often considered the father of economics. You've got a chapter on Keynes. You've got a chapter on Friedman. And you've got a chapter on Hayek, all the great modern economists. Is it possible, John, to be a distinguished economist one way or the other and not be a critic of capitalism?John Cassidy: Well, I don't—I mean, I think history would suggest that the greatest economists have been critics of capitalism in their own time. People would say to me, what the hell have you got Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in a book about critics of capitalism? They were great exponents, defenders of capitalism. They loved the system. That is perfectly true. But in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, middle of the 20th century, they were actually arch-critics of the ruling form of capitalism at the time, which was what I call managed capitalism. What some people call Keynesianism, what other people call European social democracy, whatever you call it, it was a model of a mixed economy in which the government played a large role both in propping up demand and in providing an extensive social safety net in the UK and providing public healthcare and public education. It was a sort of hybrid model.Most of the economy in terms of the businesses remained in private hands. So most production was capitalistic. It was a capitalist system. They didn't go to the Soviet model of nationalizing everything and Britain did nationalize some businesses, but most places didn't. The US of course didn't but it was a form of managed capitalism. And Hayek and Friedman were both great critics of that and wanted to sort of move back to 19th century laissez-faire model.Keynes was a—was actually a great, I view him anyway, as really a sort of late Victorian liberal and was trying to protect as much of the sort of J.S. Mill view of the world as he could, but he thought capitalism had one fatal flaw: that it tended to fall into recessions and then they can snowball and the whole system can collapse which is what had basically happened in the early 1930s until Keynesian policies were adopted. Keynes sort of differed from a lot of his followers—I have a chapter on Joan Robinson in there, who were pretty left-wing and wanted to sort of use Keynesianism as a way to shift the economy quite far to the left. Keynes didn't really believe in that. He has a famous quote that, you know, once you get to full employment, you can then rely on the free market to sort of take care of things. He was still a liberal at heart.Going back to Adam Smith, why is he in a book on criticism of capitalism? And again, it goes back to what I said at the beginning. He actually wrote "The Wealth of Nations"—he explains in the introduction—as a critique of mercantile capitalism. His argument was that he was a pro-free trader, pro-small business, free enterprise. His argument was if you get the government out of the way, we don't need these government-sponsored monopolies like the East India Company. If you just rely on the market, the sort of market forces and competition will produce a good outcome. So then he was seen as a great—you know, he is then seen as the apostle of free market capitalism. I mean when I started as a young reporter, when I used to report in Washington, all the conservatives used to wear Adam Smith badges. You don't see Donald Trump wearing an Adam Smith badge, but that was the case.He was also—the other aspect of Smith, which I highlight, which is not often remarked on—he's also a critic of big business. He has a famous section where he discusses the sort of tendency of any group of more than three businessmen when they get together to try and raise prices and conspire against consumers. And he was very suspicious of, as I say, large companies, monopolies. I think if Adam Smith existed today, I mean, I think he would be a big supporter of Lina Khan and the sort of antitrust movement, he would say capitalism is great as long as you have competition, but if you don't have competition it becomes, you know, exploitative.Andrew Keen: Yeah, if Smith came back to live today, you have a chapter on Thomas Piketty, maybe he may not be French, but he may be taking that position about how the rich benefit from the structure of investment. Piketty's core—I've never had Piketty on the show, but I've had some of his followers like Emmanuel Saez from Berkeley. Yeah. How powerful is Piketty's critique of capitalism within the context of the classical economic analysis from Hayek and Friedman? Yeah, it's a very good question.John Cassidy: It's a very good question. I mean, he's a very paradoxical figure, Piketty, in that he obviously shot to world fame and stardom with his book on capital in the 21st century, which in some ways he obviously used the capital as a way of linking himself to Marx, even though he said he never read Marx. But he was basically making the same argument that if you leave capitalism unrestrained and don't do anything about monopolies etc. or wealth, you're going to get massive inequality and he—I think his great contribution, Piketty and the school of people, one of them you mentioned, around him was we sort of had a vague idea that inequality was going up and that, you know, wages were stagnating, etc.What he and his colleagues did is they produced these sort of scientific empirical studies showing in very simple to understand terms how the sort of share of income and wealth of the top 10 percent, the top 5 percent, the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent basically skyrocketed from the 1970s to about 2010. And it was, you know, he was an MIT PhD. Saez, who you mentioned, is a Berkeley professor. They were schooled in neoclassical economics at Harvard and MIT and places like that. So the right couldn't dismiss them as sort of, you know, lefties or Trots or whatever who're just sort of making this stuff up. They had to acknowledge that this was actually an empirical reality.I think it did change the whole basis of the debate and it was sort of part of this reaction against capitalism in the 2010s. You know it was obviously linked to the sort of Sanders and the Occupy Wall Street movement at the time. It came out of the—you know, the financial crisis as well when Wall Street disgraced itself. I mean, I wrote a previous book on all that, but people have sort of, I think, forgotten the great reaction against that a decade ago, which I think even Trump sort of exploited, as I say, by using anti-banker rhetoric at the time.So, Piketty was a great figure, I think, from, you know, I was thinking, who are the most influential critics of capitalism in the 21st century? And I think you'd have to put him up there on the list. I'm not saying he's the only one or the most eminent one. But I think he is a central figure. Now, of course, you'd think, well, this is a really powerful critic of capitalism, and nobody's going to pick up, and Bernie's going to take off and everything. But here we are a decade later now. It seems to be what the backlash has produced is a swing to the right, not a swing to the left. So that's, again, a sort of paradox.Andrew Keen: One person I didn't expect to come up in the book, John, and I was fascinated with this chapter, is Silvia Federici. I've tried to get her on the show. We've had some books about her writing and her kind of—I don't know, you treat her critique as a feminist one. The role of women. Why did you choose to write a chapter about Federici and that feminist critique of capitalism?John Cassidy: Right, right. Well, I don't think it was just feminist. I'll explain what I think it was. Two reasons. Number one, I wanted to get more women into the book. I mean, it's in some sense, it is a history of economics and economic critiques. And they are overwhelmingly written by men and women were sort of written out of the narrative of capitalism for a very long time. So I tried to include as many sort of women as actual thinkers as I could and I have a couple of early socialist feminist thinkers, Anna Wheeler and Flora Tristan and then I cover some of the—I cover Rosa Luxemburg as the great sort of tribune of the left revolutionary socialist, communist whatever you want to call it. Anti-capitalist I think is probably also important to note about. Yeah, and then I also have Joan Robinson, but I wanted somebody to do something in the modern era, and I thought Federici, in the world of the Wages for Housework movement, is very interesting from two perspectives.Number one, Federici herself is a Marxist, and I think she probably would still consider herself a revolutionary. She's based in New York, as you know now. She lived in New York for 50 years, but she came from—she's originally Italian and came out of the Italian left in the 1960s, which was very radical. Do you know her? Did you talk to her? I didn't talk to her on this. No, she—I basically relied on, there has been a lot of, as you say, there's been a lot of stuff written about her over the years. She's written, you know, she's given various long interviews and she's written a book herself, a version, a history of housework, so I figured it was all there and it was just a matter of pulling it together.But I think the critique, why the critique is interesting, most of the book is a sort of critique of how capitalism works, you know, in the production or you know, in factories or in offices or you know, wherever capitalist operations are working, but her critique is sort of domestic reproduction, as she calls it, the role of unpaid labor in supporting capitalism. I mean it goes back a long way actually. There was this moment, I sort of trace it back to the 1940s and 1950s when there were feminists in America who were demonstrating outside factories and making the point that you know, the factory workers and the operations of the factory, it couldn't—there's one of the famous sort of tire factory in California demonstrations where the women made the argument, look this factory can't continue to operate unless we feed and clothe the workers and provide the next generation of workers. You know, that's domestic reproduction. So their argument was that housework should be paid and Federici took that idea and a couple of her colleagues, she founded the—it's a global movement, but she founded the most famous branch in New York City in the 1970s. In Park Slope near where I live actually.And they were—you call it feminists, they were feminists in a way, but they were rejected by the sort of mainstream feminist movement, the sort of Gloria Steinems of the world, who Federici was very critical of because she said they ignored, they really just wanted to get women ahead in the sort of capitalist economy and they ignored the sort of underlying from her perspective, the underlying sort of illegitimacy and exploitation of that system. So they were never accepted as part of the feminist movement. They're to the left of the Feminist Movement.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Keynes, of course, so central in all this, particularly his analysis of the role of automation in capitalism. We did a show recently with Robert Skidelsky and I'm sure you're familiar—John Cassidy: Yeah, yeah, great, great biography of Keynes.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the great biographer of Keynes, whose latest book is "Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of AI." You yourself wrote a brilliant book on the last tech mania and dot-com capitalism. I used it in a lot of my writing and books. What's your analysis of AI in this latest mania and the role generally of manias in the history of capitalism and indeed in critiquing capitalism? Is AI just the next chapter of the dot-com boom?John Cassidy: I think it's a very deep question. I think I'd give two answers to it. In one sense it is just the latest mania the way—I mean, the way capitalism works is we have these, I go back to Kondratiev, one of my Russian economists who ended up being killed by Stalin. He was the sort of inventor of the long wave theory of capitalism. We have these short waves where you have sort of booms and busts driven by finance and debt etc. But we also have long waves driven by technology.And obviously, in the last 40, 50 years, the two big ones are the original deployment of the internet and microchip technology in the sort of 80s and 90s culminating in the dot-com boom of the late 90s, which as you say, I wrote about. Thanks very much for your kind comments on the book. If you just sort of compare it from a financial basis I think they are very similar just in terms of the sort of role of hype from Wall Street in hyping up these companies. The sort of FOMO aspect of it among investors that they you know, you can't miss out. So just buy the companies blindly. And the sort of lionization in the press and the media of, you know, of AI as the sort of great wave of the future.So if you take a sort of skeptical market based approach, I would say, yeah, this is just another sort of another mania which will eventually burst and it looked like it had burst for a few weeks when Trump put the tariffs up, now the market seemed to be recovering. But I think there is, there may be something new about it. I am not, I don't pretend to be a technical expert. I try to rely on the evidence of or the testimony of people who know the systems well and also economists who have studied it. It seems to me the closer you get to it the more alarming it is in terms of the potential shock value that there is there.I mean Trump and the sort of reaction to a larger extent can be traced back to the China shock where we had this global shock to American manufacturing and sort of hollowed out a lot of the industrial areas much of it, like industrial Britain was hollowed out in the 80s. If you, you know, even people like Altman and Elon Musk, they seem to think that this is going to be on a much larger scale than that and will basically, you know, get rid of the professions as they exist. Which would be a huge, huge shock. And I think a lot of the economists who studied this, who four or five years ago were relatively optimistic, people like Daron Acemoglu, David Autor—Andrew Keen: Simon Johnson, of course, who just won the Nobel Prize, and he's from England.John Cassidy: Simon, I did an event with Simon earlier this week. You know they've studied this a lot more closely than I have but I do interview them and I think five, six years ago they were sort of optimistic that you know this could just be a new steam engine or could be a microchip which would lead to sort of a lot more growth, rising productivity, rising productivity is usually associated with rising wages so sure there'd be short-term costs but ultimately it would be a good thing. Now, I think if you speak to them, they see since the, you know, obviously, the OpenAI—the original launch and now there's just this huge arms race with no government involvement at all I think they're coming to the conclusion that rather than being developed to sort of complement human labor, all these systems are just being rushed out to substitute for human labor. And it's just going, if current trends persist, it's going to be a China shock on an even bigger scale.You know what is going to, if that, if they're right, that is going to produce some huge political backlash at some point, that's inevitable. So I know—the thing when the dot-com bubble burst, it didn't really have that much long-term impact on the economy. People lost the sort of fake money they thought they'd made. And then the companies, obviously some of the companies like Amazon and you know Google were real genuine profit-making companies and if you bought them early you made a fortune. But AI does seem a sort of bigger, scarier phenomenon to me. I don't know. I mean, you're close to it. What do you think?Andrew Keen: Well, I'm waiting for a book, John, from you. I think you can combine dot-com and capitalism and its critics. We need you probably to cover it—you know more about it than me. Final question, I mean, it's a wonderful book and we haven't even scratched the surface everyone needs to get it. I enjoyed the chapter, for example, on Karl Polanyi and so much more. I mean, it's a big book. But my final question, John, is do you have any regrets about anyone you left out? The one person I would have liked to have been included was Rawls because of his sort of treatment of capitalism and luck as a kind of casino. I'm not sure whether you gave any thought to Rawls, but is there someone in retrospect you should have had a chapter on that you left out?John Cassidy: There are lots of people I left out. I mean, that's the problem. I mean there have been hundreds and hundreds of critics of capitalism. Rawls, of course, incredibly influential and his idea of the sort of, you know, the veil of ignorance that you should judge things not knowing where you are in the income distribution and then—Andrew Keen: And it's luck. I mean the idea of some people get lucky and some people don't.John Cassidy: It is the luck of the draw, obviously, what card you pull. I think that is a very powerful critique, but I just—because I am more of an expert on economics, I tended to leave out philosophers and sociologists. I mean, you know, you could say, where's Max Weber? Where are the anarchists? You know, where's Emma Goldman? Where's John Kenneth Galbraith, the sort of great mid-century critic of American industrial capitalism? There's so many people that you could include. I mean, I could have written 10 volumes. In fact, I refer in the book to, you know, there's always been a problem. G.D.H. Cole, a famous English historian, wrote a history of socialism back in the 1960s and 70s. You know, just getting to 1850 took him six volumes. So, you've got to pick and choose, and I don't claim this is the history of capitalism and its critics. That would be a ridiculous claim to make. I just claim it's a history written by me, and hopefully the people are interested in it, and they're sufficiently diverse that you can address all the big questions.Andrew Keen: Well it's certainly incredibly timely. Capitalism and its critics—more and more of them. Sometimes they don't even describe themselves as critics of capitalism when they're talking about oligarchs or billionaires, they're really criticizing capitalism. A must read from one of America's leading journalists. And would you call yourself a critic of capitalism, John?John Cassidy: Yeah, I guess I am, to some extent, sure. I mean, I'm not a—you know, I'm not on the far left, but I'd say I'm a center-left critic of capitalism. Yes, definitely, that would be fair.Andrew Keen: And does the left need to learn? Does everyone on the left need to read the book and learn the language of anti-capitalism in a more coherent and honest way?John Cassidy: I hope so. I mean, obviously, I'd be talking my own book there, as they say, but I hope that people on the left, but not just people on the left. I really did try to sort of be fair to the sort of right-wing critiques as well. I included the Carlyle chapter particularly, obviously, but in the later chapters, I also sort of refer to this emerging critique on the right, the sort of economic nationalist critique. So hopefully, I think people on the right could read it to understand the critiques from the left, and people on the left could read it to understand some of the critiques on the right as well.Andrew Keen: Well, it's a lovely book. It's enormously erudite and simultaneously readable. Anyone who likes John Cassidy's work from The New Yorker will love it. Congratulations, John, on the new book, and I'd love to get you back on the show as anti-capitalism in America picks up steam and perhaps manifests itself in the 2028 election. Thank you so much.John Cassidy: Thanks very much for inviting me on, it was fun.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

https://youtu.be/0R_RjyOJeI4 Podcast audio: In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Ben Bayer, Robertas Bakula, and Tristan de Liège explore how the mixed economy enables the unjust exploitation of society's most productive individuals. Among the topics covered: Why, contrary to Marxist claims, businesspeople are the most exploited group in a mixed economy; How antitrust laws enable the government and less successful companies to exploit successful companies; How tariffs drive the material and spiritual exploitation of producers; How farm subsidies reward stagnation at the taxpayers' expense; How Atlas Shrugged dramatizes the exploitation of producers. Recommended in this podcast are Ayn Rand's books Atlas Shrugged and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and the recent podcast episode on “The Marxists' Exploitation Myth.” The podcast was recorded on May 5, 2025 and posted on May 7, 2025. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Apr 13, 2023 In this unlocked patreon episode, Breht, Adnan, and Henry from Guerrilla History discuss their thoughts on the relationship between religion and Marxism, how Marxists today might think differently about religion compared to Marxists 100 years ago, religion and spirituality as a terrain of struggle for the Left, how to think about science vs. religion, the material basis of religion, what form the religious impulse might take under communism, demystification and meditation, and much more. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

Today we'll be rebroadcasting our conversation with David Horowitz, the influential author, speaker, and conservative activist who passed away 4/29/25 at the age of 86 after a long battle with cancer. Best known for his memoir Radical Son and for boldly confronting radical ideologies on college campuses, Horowitz spent a lifetime navigating—and ultimately rejecting—the political extremes of the American Left. From his early days among Marxists and Black Panthers to his fierce advocacy for free speech and Western values through the David Horowitz Freedom Center, his voice remained unapologetically clear. His journey from revolutionary to Reagan Republican left a permanent mark on America's culture wars. [Original airdate: 2/16/23] TODAY'S GUEST: David Horowitz is founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the bestselling author of several books, including Radical Son, The Black Book Of The American Left, Dark Agenda: The War To Destroy Christian America, and his brand new book, FINAL BATTLE: THE NEXT ELECTION COULD BE THE LAST. Final Battle, by David Horowitz, exposes the real threat that Democrats pose to freedom. The rise of socialism and critical race theory, coupled with threats to the Electoral College and Senate, an independent judiciary, and the integrity of the electoral system, now threaten to destroy the traditions that bring Americans together — the heart of our democracy. ...Americans now speak in different and antagonistic political languages, and the two parties are so polarized that the American way of life itself is at risk.

This episode is presented by Create A Video – Dr. William Forstchen joins me to discuss the necessity of building the Golden Dome missile defense system. Plus, Marxists have hijacked the planning for America's 250th birthday events. Subscribe to the podcast at: https://ThePetePod.com/ All the links to Pete's Prep are free: https://patreon.com/petekalinershow Media Bias Check: If you choose to subscribe, get 15% off here! Advertising and Booking inquiries: Pete@ThePeteKalinerShow.comGet exclusive content here!: https://thepetekalinershow.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Wednesday's Mark Levin Show, Ben Ferguson of the Ben Ferguson podcast fills in for Mark. Do you believe that Iran should be able to have nuclear weapons? Iran's Supreme Leader said, "Death to America is not a slogan; it's a policy." When Iran tells you they want to wipe America off the face of the Earth - we should believe them. Mark Levin weighed in stating: “No nukes for Iran! These are genocidal maniacs! It's a terrorist regime! More important that we protect our country from their nuclear bombs than we protect their nuclear sites from our bombs! There are no second chances.” President Trump has stated many times that he'll make sure Iran doesn't get any nukes. Meanwhile, the United States and Ukraine signed the long-awaited mineral deal. This is a massive win for Trump, the American taxpayer and Ukraine. Later, the Democrat party is dead, it's now a party controlled by Marxists and Socialists. In other countries run by Socialists, legal systems often turn into kangaroo courts. We're witnessing this now with activist judges, showing how many Marxists have worked their way into the system. This might be the biggest threat to democracy. When activist judges act outside the scope of the law, it demonstrates how dangerous this can be to our freedoms. These judges believe they should be able to override what the people voted for. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week you'll hear our chat with the author of Countering Dispossession: Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography, the political ecologist David E Gilbert (not to be confused with the former Weather Underground prisoner in the US). For this episode, David and I speak about the book, the small community in south Sumatra, Indonesia known as Casiavera, the legacy of colonial land grabs, the people who live there and the agro-ecology of the rainforest at the base of the Arin volcano. You can find more of David's work at https://DavidEGilbert.Com Links: The Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice by Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys Via Campesina: https://viacampesina.org/ Landless Workers Movement (MST): https://mst.org.br/ Sarakhat Patani Indonesia (SPI): https://spi.or.id/ Mentions of Tan Malaka in the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library (https://sea.theanarchistlibrary.org/search?query=tan+malaka ) or writings on Marxists.Org (https://www.marxists.org/archive/malaka/ ) Feed'em Freedom Foundation (Detroit): https://feedemfreedom.org/ Our interviews on the ZAD: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/?s=zad Grassroots Indonesian Eco-movement Wahli: https://www.walhi.or.id/ Announcement May Day Happy upcoming May Day, comrades known and unknown! I hope that wherever you are and whatever you do, you're surrounded by siblings in love and struggle, you can take pleasure in the beauty of the world around you, take strength from our predecessors who share our vision of a life unencumbered by state / capital & the other anchors foisted upon our shoulders, and with the energy to create a path towards our desires Ángel Espinosa Villegas We had an interview scheduled with Ángel Espinosa Villegas, a trans masc butch dyke, formerly a 2020 uprising prisoner who was transferred to ICE detention for deportation, however the screws seem to have decided to escalate the deportation to Chile rather than let hir continue to speak to the media. Keep an eye out for upcoming interviews with Ángel, and consider checking out hir GoFundMe. At the end of this post there are some statements from Angel... Supporting The Show Hey listeners… we've had a string of early releases with more on the way coming out through our patreon for supporters at $3 or more a month, alongside other thank-you gifts. If you can kick in and help, the funds go to our online hosting, and creation of promotional materials like shirts and stickers, but MOSTLY to funding our transcription efforts. We hate to ask for money, but if you have the capacity to kick us a few bucks a month, either through the patreon or via venmo, paypal or librepay or by buying some merch from us (we have a few 3x, 4x & 5x sized tshirts in kelly green coming soon), we'd very much appreciate the support. We're hoping to make a big sticker order in the near future. If you need another motivator, the 15th anniversary of The Final Straw Radio is coming up on May 9th, 2025 and we are not above accepting birthday presents. That's 15 years of weekly audio (albeit at the beginning it was more music than talk), including 8 of which 7 of which aren't in our podcast stream (you can find some early show examples in this link _by skipping to the last page of posts on our blog). Other ways to support us include rating and reviewing us on google, apple, amazon and the other podcasting platforms, printing out and mailing our interviews into prisoners, using our audio or text as the basis for a discussion of an ongoing movement, contacting your local radio station to get us on the airwaves, and talking about us to others in person or on social media. Alright, capping this shameless plug! Angel statements: These are press statements and direct quotes that Ángel Espinosa-Villegas has provided from inside Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, TX, where she was held from April 1 to April 25, 2025. Ángel is currently in transfer to an undisclosed location, but has not been able to contact loved ones yet. These messages were received by loved ones on the outside throughout the past 3 weeks and she has given explicit permission to publicize these statements. “We dance a lot, draw our hopes and homes on the walls of this place any way we can. We tell stories of home, hold each other past language barriers because we all know all too well what it's like to be torn away from our families, hold onto hope, only for it to be crushed cruelly by these heartless fascist traitors. To remain utterly powerless at the mercy of the abusers of gluttonous power. People are quite literally dragged out, hogtied, by these pirates that speak of protecting democracy yet dehumanize and humiliate us without so much as a look in our eyes before ripping us apart from our newfound friends, and, more distantly, our families we have here. They rob us of the little money we have and have no paths of recovery. They tell us clean water is a privilege and not a right. That speaking to our families is a privilege. That seeing the sun is a privilege. That if we get too loud of this constant mistreatment, then we should get ready to eat mace.” “Most people here don't have the means to speak out against these human rights' violations we face every day. But I will take any and every chance to fight, to expose the way they treat us that these human traitors have normalized.” “This was supposed to never happen again. But here it is again. We need everyone demanding our freedom, to expose all the vultures robbing these vulnerable people of everything from money to merely see our families and small children. We're not even allowed to say goodbye, to hug our children goodbye. What madness is this? How is this STILL happening to us, I ask myself when I wake up. Is this country for the free? For those yearning for a safe, happy life? If this country and its people care about freedom and safety, then people should refuse to let this government and administration work a second longer until they free us ALL.” “A lot of women here are fighting their cases because they've been following protocol to obtain legal papers or asylum or were just rounded up randomly from racial profiling. One woman here lost her purse with all her money on a train and went to church to seek help. The church called ICE on her because she couldn't speak English! Another woman here was late to her job and her boss called ICE on her. Few of us have criminal records. Most were just following advice from their lawyers and continuing their appointments with ICE and USCIS to get their visa or temporary protected status or whatever it was they were doing. But because of Trump's administration they're all rounded up by ICE and deported.” “I'm feeling alright, mostly numb since being locked up is so abusive and heart wrenching. Here... It's a rollercoaster. I witness, every single day, cries of agony and anger and despair. I see people hogtied and dragged out. People being yelled at to gather their things and go into the unknown, being threatened with PREA for hugging as we say our goodbyes and well wishes. This place is much worse than prison in many ways. I hear guttural wails and sobs so many times a day. It's like being at a perpetual funeral; laying to rest this person's life, that one's dreams, the other's hope. Knowing they'll be inevitably harmed, kidnapped, sometimes disappeared or even killed when they go and we can do absolutely nothing.” “We're just hostages. Being one for so long now... I'm so hollow on the inside. I haven't dropped any tears the last year and a half. I just can't. Not even when I was sentenced. I don't know how I'll even begin to heal, but I sure as fuck ain't ever gonna stop fighting. My hope and ambition to fight... I've just been refueling his entire time being down.” “Fighting brings me solace. Helping others brings me solace, some meaningfulness, a melting of stone in my petrified heart. I spend most of my time going around and helping people as much as I can; working the tablets, giving phone calls, cooking food, doing little chores and tasks for the older, sick, or disabled ladies.“ With love & solidarity, Free All Dykes . ... . .. Featured Track: Judas Goat by Filastine from Burn It (a benefit for Green Scare defendants)

Most of the new SCOTUS justices that were put on the court as 'conservatives' have been total disappointments. They seem to rule more in favor of illegals and gangs than they do for Americans. The dems are at war within the party, it's the Marxist vs the semi-Marxists. With the passing of Pope Francis, who will be the next leader of the Catholic Church? Guest: Father Frank Pavone - Priests for Life Sponsor: My Pillow Www.MyPillow.com/johnSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On Wednesday's Mark Levin Show, Elon Musk, once aligned with the left, has become a patriot and hero. From the moment he purchased and exposed Twitter, he became a target of the media and the left. Musk's efforts to uncover hundreds of billions in government waste, fraud, and abuse, have cost him millions and hurt Tesla. Alongside President Trump, Musk risked everything for America. This moment right now is critical for slashing government spending, a unique opportunity driven by Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Also, some conservatives keep saying that the Democrat Party is dead. Most people who say this have no idea what they're talking about. Democrats and Marxists aren't dead—they're just retooling and regrouping. This is a dangerous, even evil party, and you don't turn your back on them. Saying they're finished is an excuse not to decisively defeat them. If Democrats take one or both houses of Congress, you'll see they're far from dead—their attacks will be relentless. They will undermine Trump's entire agenda. Later, Sen Ron Johnson has said he wants hearings on what happened on 9/11. Here's what happened: Islamist terrorists attacked us, flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed in central Pennsylvania because heroes rushed the cabin.  And now, Islamist terrorists in Iran are building a nuclear weapon while threatening to destroy us and Qatar is funding terrorists like Hamas and front groups in our country.   Afterward, Landmark Legal Foundation filed a brief with the appellate court to prevent further contempt proceedings by Judge James Boasberg.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sean and Varn catch up on the first 100 days or so of Trump 2.0, the inanities and indignities of history forced to move again in dumb, but possibly productive ways. Most of all this moment calls for humility amidst radical political and economic changes we might only be able to 'sane-wash' in 20 or 30 years, if ever. How have recent events challenged our priors as Marxists or as Millennials or as Americans? Even if the Left is largely powerless to affect global events, do we at least have the courage to situate ourselves and our own subjectivities within the massive changes of the last 10 to 15 years? How might the left wing of capital respond to the current chaos and how might we?To listen to the bonus portion of this episode (where all the deportable offenses might happen) become a patron at www.patreon.com/theantifada for this and all our great bonus content.To watch this episode on video become a patron of the excellent, independent Varn Vlog at www.patreon.com/varnvlog

Most of the new SCOTUS justices that were put on the court as 'conservatives' have been total disappointments. They seem to rule more in favor of illegals and gangs than they do for Americans. The dems are at war within the party, it's the Marxist vs the semi-Marxists. With the passing of Pope Francis, who will be the next leader of the Catholic Church? Guest: Father Frank Pavone - Priests for Life Sponsor: My Pillow Www.MyPillow.com/johnSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell, it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and America. He highlights key figures like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, and Franklin, discussing their contributions to concepts of religious tolerance, free speech, and rationality. In our conversation, Bell addresses criticisms of the Enlightenment, including its complicated relationship with colonialism and slavery, while arguing that its principles of freedom and reason remain relevant today. 5 Key Takeaways* The Enlightenment emerged in the early 18th century (around 1720s) and was characterized by intellectual inquiry, skepticism toward religion, and a growing sense among thinkers that they were living in an "enlightened century."* While Paris was the central hub, the Enlightenment had multiple centers including Scotland, Germany, and America, with thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Franklin contributing to its development.* The Enlightenment introduced the concept of "society" as a sphere of human existence separate from religion and politics, forming the basis of modern social sciences.* The movement had a complex relationship with colonialism and slavery - many Enlightenment thinkers criticized slavery, but some of their ideas about human progress were later used to justify imperialism.* According to Bell, rather than trying to "return to the Enlightenment," modern society should selectively adopt and adapt its valuable principles of free speech, religious tolerance, and education to create our "own Enlightenment."David Avrom Bell is a historian of early modern and modern Europe at Princeton University. His most recent book, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Described in the Journal of Modern History as an "instant classic," it is available in paperback from Picador, in French translation from Fayard, and in Italian translation from Viella. A study of how new forms of political charisma arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book shows that charismatic authoritarianism is as modern a political form as liberal democracy, and shares many of the same origins. Based on exhaustive research in original sources, the book includes case studies of the careers of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture and Simon Bolivar. The book's Introduction can be read here. An online conversation about the book with Annette Gordon-Reed, hosted by the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, can be viewed here. Links to material about the book, including reviews in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues can be found here. Bell is also the author of six previous books. He has published academic articles in both English and French and contributes regularly to general interest publications on a variety of subjects, ranging from modern warfare, to contemporary French politics, to the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship, and of course French history. A list of his publications from 2023 and 2024 can be found here. His Substack newsletter can be found here. His writings have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Italian, Turkish and Japanese. At the History Department at Princeton University, he holds the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Chair in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions, and offers courses on early modern Europe, on military history, and on the early modern French empire. Previously, he spent fourteen years at Johns Hopkins University, including three as Dean of Faculty in its School of Arts and Sciences. From 2020 to 2024 he served as Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Bell's new project is a history of the Enlightenment. A preliminary article from the project was published in early 2022 by Modern Intellectual History. Another is now out in French History.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. FULL TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, in these supposedly dark times, the E word comes up a lot, the Enlightenment. Are we at the end of the Enlightenment or the beginning? Was there even an Enlightenment? My guest today, David Bell, a professor of history, very distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, has an interesting piece in the spring issue of It is One of our, our favorite quarterlies here on Keen on America, Bell's piece is The Enlightenment Then and Now, and David is joining us from the home of the Enlightenment, perhaps Paris in France, where he's on sabbatical hard life. David being an academic these days, isn't it?David Bell: Very difficult. I'm having to suffer the Parisian bread and croissant. It's terrible.Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, I won't keep you too long. Is Paris then, or France? Is it the home of the Enlightenment? I know there are many Enlightenments, the French, the Scottish, maybe even the English, perhaps even the American.David Bell: It's certainly one of the homes of the Enlightenment, and it's probably the closest that the Enlightened had to a center, absolutely. But as you say, there were Edinburgh, Glasgow, plenty of places in Germany, Philadelphia, all those places have good claims to being centers of the enlightenment as well.Andrew Keen: All the same David, is it like one of those sports games in California where everyone gets a medal?David Bell: Well, they're different metals, right, but I think certainly Paris is where everybody went. I mean, if you look at the figures from the German Enlightenment, from the Scottish Enlightenment from the American Enlightenment they all tended to congregate in Paris and the Parisians didn't tend to go anywhere else unless they were forced to. So that gives you a pretty good sense of where the most important center was.Andrew Keen: So David, before we get to specifics, map out for us, because everyone is perhaps as familiar or comfortable with the history of the Enlightenment, and certainly as you are. When did it happen? What years? And who are the leaders of this thing called the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, that's a big question. And I'm afraid, of course, that if you ask 10 historians, you'll get 10 different answers.Andrew Keen: Well, I'm only asking you, so I only want one answer.David Bell: So I would say that the Enlightenment really gets going around the first couple of decades of the 18th century. And that's when people really start to think that they are actually living in what they start to call an Enlightenment century. There are a lot of reasons for this. They are seeing what we now call the scientific revolution. They're looking at the progress that has been made with that. They are experiencing the changes in the religious sphere, including the end of religious wars, coming with a great deal of skepticism about religion. They are living in a relative period of peace where they're able to speculate much more broadly and daringly than before. But it's really in those first couple of decades that they start thinking of themselves as living in an enlightened century. They start defining themselves as something that would later be called the enlightenment. So I would say that it's, really, really there between maybe the end of the 17th century and 1720s that it really gets started.Andrew Keen: So let's have some names, David, of philosophers, I guess. I mean, if those are the right words. I know that there was a term in French. There is a term called philosoph. Were they the founders, the leaders of the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, there is a... Again, I don't want to descend into academic quibbling here, but there were lots of leaders. Let me give an example, though. So the year 1721 is a remarkable year. So in the year, 1721, two amazing events happened within a couple of months of each other. So in May, Montesquieu, one of the great philosophers by any definition, publishes his novel called Persian Letters. And this is an incredible novel. Still, I think one of greatest novels ever written, and it's very daring. It is the account, it is supposedly a an account written by two Persian travelers to Europe who are writing back to people in Isfahan about what they're seeing. And it is very critical of French society. It is very of religion. It is, as I said, very daring philosophically. It is a product in part of the increasing contact between Europe and the rest of the world that is also very central to the Enlightenment. So that novel comes out. So it's immediately, you know, the police try to suppress it. But they don't have much success because it's incredibly popular and Montesquieu doesn't suffer any particular problems because...Andrew Keen: And the French police have never been the most efficient police force in the world, have they?David Bell: Oh, they could be, but not in this case. And then two months later, after Montesquieu published this novel, there's a German philosopher much less well-known than Montesqiu, than Christian Bolz, who is a professor at the Universität Haller in Prussia, and he gives an oration in Latin, a very typical university oration for the time, about Chinese philosophy, in which he says that the Chinese have sort of proved to the world, particularly through the writings of Confucius and others, that you can have a virtuous society without religion. Obviously very controversial. Statement for the time it actually gets him fired from his job, he has to leave the Kingdom of Prussia within 48 hours on penalty of death, starts an enormous controversy. But here are two events, both of which involving non-European people, involving the way in which Europeans are starting to look out at the rest of the world and starting to imagine Europe as just one part of a larger humanity, and at the same time they are starting to speculate very daringly about whether you can have. You know, what it means to have a society, do you need to have religion in order to have morality in society? Do you need the proper, what kind of government do you need to to have virtuous conduct and a proper society? So all of these things get, you know, really crystallize, I think, around these two incidents as much as anything. So if I had to pick a single date for when the enlightenment starts, I'd probably pick that 1721.Andrew Keen: And when was, David, I thought you were going to tell me about the earthquake in Lisbon, when was that earthquake?David Bell: That earthquake comes quite a bit later. That comes, and now historians should be better with dates than I am. It's in the 1750s, I think it's the late 1750's. Again, this historian is proving he's getting a very bad grade for forgetting the exact date, but it's in 1750. So that's a different kind of event, which sparks off a great deal of commentary, because it's a terrible earthquake. It destroys most of the city of Lisbon, it destroys other cities throughout Portugal, and it leads a lot of the philosophy to philosophers at the time to be speculating very daringly again on whether there is any kind of real purpose to the universe and whether there's any kind divine purpose. Why would such a terrible thing happen? Why would God do such a thing to his followers? And certainly VoltaireAndrew Keen: Yeah, Votav, of course, comes to mind of questioning.David Bell: And Condit, Voltaire's novel Condit gives a very good description of the earthquake in Lisbon and uses that as a centerpiece. Voltair also read other things about the earthquake, a poem about Lisbon earthquake. But in Condit he gives a lasting, very scathing portrait of the Catholic Church in general and then of what happens in Portugal. And so the Lisbon Earthquake is certainly another one of the events, but it happens considerably later. Really in the middle of the end of life.Andrew Keen: So, David, you believe in this idea of the Enlightenment. I take your point that there are more than one Enlightenment in more than one center, but in broad historical terms, the 18th century could be defined at least in Western and Northern Europe as the period of the Enlightenment, would that be a fair generalization?David Bell: I think it's perfectly fair generalization. Of course, there are historians who say that it never happened. There's a conservative British historian, J.C.D. Clark, who published a book last summer, saying that the Enlightenment is a kind of myth, that there was a lot of intellectual activity in Europe, obviously, but that the idea that it formed a coherent Enlightenment was really invented in the 20th century by a bunch of progressive reformers who wanted to claim a kind of venerable and august pedigree for their own reform, liberal reform plans. I think that's an exaggeration. People in the 18th century defined very clearly what was going on, both people who were in favor of it and people who are against it. And while you can, if you look very closely at it, of course it gets a bit fuzzy. Of course it's gets, there's no single, you can't define a single enlightenment project or a single enlightened ideology. But then, I think people would be hard pressed to define any intellectual movement. You know, in perfect, incoherent terms. So the enlightenment is, you know by compared with almost any other intellectual movement certainly existed.Andrew Keen: In terms of a philosophy of the Enlightenment, the German thinker, Immanuel Kant, seems to be often, and when you describe him as the conscience or the brain or a mixture of the conscience and brain of the enlightenment, why is Kant and Kantian thinking so important in the development of the Enlightenment.David Bell: Well, that's a really interesting question. And one reason is because most of the Enlightenment was not very rigorously philosophical. A lot of the major figures of the enlightenment before Kant tended to be writing for a general public. And they often were writing with a very specific agenda. We look at Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau. Now you look at Adam Smith in Scotland. We look David Hume or Adam Ferguson. You look at Benjamin Franklin in the United States. These people wrote in all sorts of different genres. They wrote in, they wrote all sorts of different kinds of books. They have many different purposes and very few of them did a lot of what we would call rigorous academic philosophy. And Kant was different. Kant was very much an academic philosopher. Kant was nothing if not rigorous. He came at the end of the enlightenment by most people's measure. He wrote these very, very difficult, very rigorous, very brilliant works, such as The Creek of Pure Reason. And so, it's certainly been the case that people who wanted to describe the Enlightenment as a philosophy have tended to look to Kant. So for example, there's a great German philosopher and intellectual historian of the early 20th century named Ernst Kassirer, who had to leave Germany because of the Nazis. And he wrote a great book called The Philosophy of the Enlightened. And that leads directly to Immanuel Kant. And of course, Casir himself was a Kantian, identified with Kant. And so he wanted to make Kant, in a sense, the telos, the end point, the culmination, the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. But so I think that's why Kant has such a particularly important position. You're defining it both ways.Andrew Keen: I've always struggled to understand what Kant was trying to say. I'm certainly not alone there. Might it be fair to say that he was trying to transform the universe and certainly traditional Christian notions into the Enlightenment, so the entire universe, the world, God, whatever that means, that they were all somehow according to Kant enlightened.David Bell: Well, I think that I'm certainly no expert on Immanuel Kant. And I would say that he is trying to, I mean, his major philosophical works are trying to put together a system of philosophical thinking which will justify why people have to act morally, why people act rationally, without the need for Christian revelation to bolster them. That's a very, very crude and reductionist way of putting it, but that's essentially at the heart of it. At the same time, Kant was very much aware of his own place in history. So Kant didn't simply write these very difficult, thick, dense philosophical works. He also wrote things that were more like journalism or like tablets. He wrote a famous essay called What is Enlightenment? And in that, he said that the 18th century was the period in which humankind was simply beginning to. Reach a period of enlightenment. And he said, he starts the essay by saying, this is the period when humankind is being released from its self-imposed tutelage. And we are still, and he said we do not yet live in the midst of a completely enlightened century, but we are getting there. We are living in a century that is enlightening.Andrew Keen: So the seeds, the seeds of Hegel and maybe even Marx are incant in that German thinking, that historical thinking.David Bell: In some ways, in some ways of course Hegel very much reacts against Kant and so and then Marx reacts against Hegel. So it's not exactly.Andrew Keen: Well, that's the dialectic, isn't it, David?David Bell: A simple easy path from one to the other, no, but Hegel is unimaginable without Kant of course and Marx is unimagineable without Hegel.Andrew Keen: You note that Kant represents a shift in some ways into the university and the walls of the universities were going up, and that some of the other figures associated with the the Enlightenment and Scottish Enlightenment, human and Smith and the French Enlightenment Voltaire and the others, they were more generalist writers. Should we be nostalgic for the pre-university period in the Enlightenment, or? Did things start getting serious once the heavyweights, the academic heavyweighs like Emmanuel Kant got into this thing?David Bell: I think it depends on where we're talking about. I mean, Adam Smith was a professor at Glasgow in Edinburgh, so Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment was definitely at least partly in the universities. The German Enlightenment took place very heavily in universities. Christian Vodafoy I just mentioned was the most important German philosopher of the 18th century before Kant, and he had positions in university. Even the French university system, for a while, what's interesting about the French University system, particularly the Sorbonne, which was the theology faculty, It was that. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, there were very vigorous, very interesting philosophical debates going on there, in which the people there, particularly even Jesuits there, were very open to a lot of the ideas we now call enlightenment. They were reading John Locke, they were reading Mel Pench, they were read Dekalb. What happened though in the French universities was that as more daring stuff was getting published elsewhere. Church, the Catholic Church, started to say, all right, these philosophers, these philosophies, these are our enemies, these are people we have to get at. And so at that point, anybody who was in the university, who was still in dialog with these people was basically purged. And the universities became much less interesting after that. But to come back to your question, I do think that I am very nostalgic for that period. I think that the Enlightenment was an extraordinary period, because if you look between. In the 17th century, not all, but a great deal of the most interesting intellectual work is happening in the so-called Republic of Letters. It's happening in Latin language. It is happening on a very small circle of RUD, of scholars. By the 19th century following Kant and Hegel and then the birth of the research university in Germany, which is copied everywhere, philosophy and the most advanced thinking goes back into the university. And the 18th century, particularly in France, I will say, is a time when the most advanced thought is being written for a general public. It is being in the form of novels, of dialogs, of stories, of reference works, and it is very, very accessible. The most profound thought of the West has never been as accessible overall as in the 18 century.Andrew Keen: Again, excuse this question, it might seem a bit naive, but there's a lot of pre-Enlightenment work, books, thinking that we read now that's very accessible from Erasmus and Thomas More to Machiavelli. Why weren't characters like, or are characters like Erasmuus, More's Utopia, Machiavell's prints and discourses, why aren't they considered part of the Enlightenment? What's the difference between? Enlightened thinkers or the supposedly enlightened thinkers of the 18th century and thinkers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.David Bell: That's a good question, you know, I think you have to, you, you know, again, one has to draw a line somewhere. That's not a very good answer, of course. All these people that you just mentioned are, in one way or another, predecessors to the Enlightenment. And of course, there were lots of people. I don't mean to say that nobody wrote in an accessible way before 1700. Obviously, lots of the people you mentioned did. Although a lot of them originally wrote in Latin, Erasmus, also Thomas More. But I think what makes the Enlightened different is that you have, again, you have a sense. These people have have a sense that they are themselves engaged in a collective project, that it is a collective project of enlightenment, of enlightening the world. They believe that they live in a century of progress. And there are certain principles. They don't agree on everything by any means. The philosophy of enlightenment is like nothing more than ripping each other to shreds, like any decent group of intellectuals. But that said, they generally did believe That people needed to have freedom of speech. They believed that you needed to have toleration of different religions. They believed in education and the need for a broadly educated public that could be as broad as possible. They generally believed in keeping religion out of the public sphere as much as possible, so all those principles came together into a program that we can consider at least a kind of... You know, not that everybody read it at every moment by any means, but there is an identifiable enlightenment program there, and in this case an identifiable enlightenment mindset. One other thing, I think, which is crucial to the Enlightenment, is that it was the attention they started to pay to something that we now take almost entirely for granted, which is the idea of society. The word society is so entirely ubiquitous, we assume it's always been there, and in one sense it has, because the word societas is a Latin word. But until... The 18th century, the word society generally had a much narrower meaning. It referred to, you know, particular institution most often, like when we talk about the society of, you know, the American philosophical society or something like that. And the idea that there exists something called society, which is the general sphere of human existence that is separate from religion and is separate from the political sphere, that's actually something which only really emerged at the end of the 1600s. And it became really the focus of you know, much, if not most, of enlightenment thinking. When you look at someone like Montesquieu and you look something, somebody like Rousseau or Voltaire or Adam Smith, probably above all, they were concerned with understanding how society works, not how government works only, but how society, what social interactions are like beginning of what we would now call social science. So that's yet another thing that distinguishes the enlightened from people like Machiavelli, often people like Thomas More, and people like bonuses.Andrew Keen: You noted earlier that the idea of progress is somehow baked in, in part, and certainly when it comes to Kant, certainly the French Enlightenment, although, of course, Rousseau challenged that. I'm not sure whether Rousseaut, as always, is both in and out of the Enlightenment and he seems to be in and out of everything. How did the Enlightement, though, make sense of itself in the context of antiquity, as it was, of Terms, it was the Renaissance that supposedly discovered or rediscovered antiquity. How did many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers, writers, how did they think of their own society in the context of not just antiquity, but even the idea of a European or Western society?David Bell: Well, there was a great book, one of the great histories of the Enlightenment was written about more than 50 years ago by the Yale professor named Peter Gay, and the first part of that book was called The Modern Paganism. So it was about the, you know, it was very much about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the ancient Greek synonyms. And certainly the writers of the enlightenment felt a great deal of kinship with the ancient Greek synonymous. They felt a common bond, particularly in the posing. Christianity and opposing what they believed the Christian Church had wrought on Europe in suppressing freedom and suppressing free thought and suppassing free inquiry. And so they felt that they were both recovering but also going beyond antiquity at the same time. And of course they were all, I mean everybody at the time, every single major figure of the Enlightenment, their education consisted in large part of what we would now call classics, right? I mean, there was an educational reformer in France in the 1760s who said, you know, our educational system is great if the purpose is to train Roman centurions, if it's to train modern people who are not doing both so well. And it's true. I mean they would spend, certainly, you know in Germany, in much of Europe, in the Netherlands, even in France, I mean people were trained not simply to read Latin, but to write in Latin. In Germany, university courses took part in the Latin language. So there's an enormous, you know, so they're certainly very, very conversant with the Greek and Roman classics, and they identify with them to a very great extent. Someone like Rousseau, I mean, and many others, and what's his first reading? How did he learn to read by reading Plutarch? In translation, but he learns to read reading Plutach. He sees from the beginning by this enormous admiration for the ancients that we get from Bhutan.Andrew Keen: Was Socrates relevant here? Was the Enlightenment somehow replacing Aristotle with Socrates and making him and his spirit of Enlightenment, of asking questions rather than answering questions, the symbol of a new way of thinking?David Bell: I would say to a certain extent, so I mean, much of the Enlightenment criticizes scholasticism, medieval scholastic, very, very sharply, and medieval scholasticism is founded philosophically very heavily upon Aristotle, so to that extent. And the spirit of skepticism that Socrates embodied, the idea of taking nothing for granted and asking questions about everything, including questions of oneself, yes, absolutely. That said, while the great figures of the Red Plato, you know, Socrates was generally I mean, it was not all that present as they come. But certainly have people with people with red play-doh in the entire virus.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Benjamin Franklin earlier, David. Most of the Enlightenment, of course, seems to be centered in France and Scotland, Germany, England. But America, many Europeans went to America then as a, what some people would call a settler colonial society, or certainly an offshoot of the European world. Was the settling of America and the American Revolution Was it the quintessential Enlightenment project?David Bell: Another very good question, and again, it depends a bit on who you talk to. I just mentioned this book by Peter Gay, and the last part of his book is called The Science of Freedom, and it's all about the American Revolution. So certainly a lot of interpreters of the Enlightenment have said that, yes, the American revolution represents in a sense the best possible outcome of the American Revolution, it was the best, possible outcome of the enlightened. Certainly there you look at the founding fathers of the United States and there's a great deal that they took from me like Certainly, they took a great great number of political ideas from Obviously Madison was very much inspired and drafting the edifice of the Constitution by Montesquieu to see himself Was happy to admit in addition most of the founding Fathers of the united states were you know had kind of you know We still had we were still definitely Christians, but we're also but we were also very much influenced by deism were very much against the idea of making the United States a kind of confessional country where Christianity was dominant. They wanted to believe in the enlightenment principles of free speech, religious toleration and so on and so forth. So in all those senses and very much the gun was probably more inspired than Franklin was somebody who was very conversant with the European Enlightenment. He spent a large part of his life in London. Where he was in contact with figures of the Enlightenment. He also, during the American Revolution, of course, he was mostly in France, where he is vetted by some of the surviving fellows and were very much in contact for them as well. So yes, I would say the American revolution is certainly... And then the American revolutionary scene, of course by the Europeans, very much as a kind of offshoot of the enlightenment. So one of the great books of the late Enlightenment is by Condor Say, which he wrote while he was hiding actually in the future evolution of the chariot. It's called a historical sketch of the progress of the human spirit, or the human mind, and you know he writes about the American Revolution as being, basically owing its existence to being like...Andrew Keen: Franklin is of course an example of your pre-academic enlightenment, a generalist, inventor, scientist, entrepreneur, political thinker. What about the role of science and indeed economics in the Enlightenment? David, we're going to talk of course about the Marxist interpretation, perhaps the Marxist interpretation which sees The Enlightenment is just a euphemism, perhaps, for exploitative capitalism. How central was the growth and development of the market, of economics, and innovation, and capitalism in your reading of The Enlightened?David Bell: Well, in my reading, it was very important, but not in the way that the Marxists used to say. So Friedrich Engels once said that the Enlightenment was basically the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie, and there was whole strain of Marxist thinking that followed the assumption that, and then Karl Marx himself argued that the documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which obviously were inspired by the Enlightment, were simply kind of the near, or kind of. Way that the bourgeoisie was able to advance itself ideologically, and I don't think that holds much water, which is very little indication that any particular economic class motivated the Enlightenment or was using the Enlightment in any way. That said, I think it's very difficult to imagine the Enlightement without the social and economic changes that come in with the 18th century. To begin with globalization. If you read the great works of the Enlightenment, it's remarkable just how open they are to talking about humanity in general. So one of Voltaire's largest works, one of his most important works, is something called Essay on Customs and the Spirit of Nations, which is actually History of the World, where he talks learnedly not simply about Europe, but about the Americas, about China, about Africa, about India. Montesquieu writes Persian letters. Christian Volpe writes about Chinese philosophy. You know, Rousseau writes about... You know, the earliest days of humankind talks about Africa. All the great figures of the Enlightenment are writing about the rest of the world, and this is a period in which contacts between Europe and the rest the world are exploding along with international trade. So by the end of the 18th century, there are 4,000 to 5,000 ships a year crossing the Atlantic. It's an enormous number. And that's one context in which the enlightenment takes place. Another is what we call the consumer revolution. So in the 18th century, certainly in the major cities of Western Europe, people of a wide range of social classes, including even artisans, sort of somewhat wealthy artisians, shopkeepers, are suddenly able to buy a much larger range of products than they were before. They're able to choose how to basically furnish their own lives, if you will, how they're gonna dress, what they're going to eat, what they gonna put on the walls of their apartments and so on and so forth. And so they become accustomed to exercising a great deal more personal choice than their ancestors have done. And the Enlightenment really develops in tandem with this. Most of the great works of the Enlightment, they're not really written to, they're treatises, they're like Kant, they're written to persuade you to think in a single way. Really written to make you ask questions yourself, to force you to ponder things. They're written in the form of puzzles and riddles. Voltaire had a great line there, he wrote that the best kind of books are the books that readers write half of themselves as they read, and that's sort of the quintessence of the Enlightenment as far as I'm concerned.Andrew Keen: Yeah, Voltaire might have been comfortable on YouTube or Facebook. David, you mentioned all those ships going from Europe across the Atlantic. Of course, many of those ships were filled with African slaves. You mentioned this in your piece. I mean, this is no secret, of course. You also mentioned a couple of times Montesquieu's Persian letters. To what extent is... The enlightenment then perhaps the birth of Western power, of Western colonialism, of going to Africa, seizing people, selling them in North America, the French, the English, Dutch colonization of the rest of the world. Of course, later more sophisticated Marxist thinkers from the Frankfurt School, you mentioned these in your essay, Odorno and Horkheimer in particular, See the Enlightenment as... A project, if you like, of Western domination. I remember reading many years ago when I was in graduate school, Edward Said, his analysis of books like The Persian Letters, which is a form of cultural Western power. How much of this is simply bound up in the profound, perhaps, injustice of the Western achievement? And of course, some of the justice as well. We haven't talked about Jefferson, but perhaps in Jefferson's life and his thinking and his enlightened principles and his... Life as a slave owner, these contradictions are most self-evident.David Bell: Well, there are certainly contradictions, and there's certainly... I think what's remarkable, if you think about it, is that if you read through works of the Enlightenment, you would be hard-pressed to find a justification for slavery. You do find a lot of critiques of slavery, and I think that's something very important to keep in mind. Obviously, the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas began well before the Enlightment, it began in 1500. The Enlightenment doesn't have the credit for being the first movement to oppose slavery. That really goes back to various religious groups, especially the Fakers. But that said, you have in France, you had in Britain, in America even, you'd have a lot of figures associated with the Enlightenment who were pretty sure of becoming very forceful opponents of slavery very early. Now, when it comes to imperialism, that's a tricky issue. What I think you'd find in these light bulbs, you'd different sorts of tendencies and different sorts of writings. So there are certainly a lot of writers of the Enlightenment who are deeply opposed to European authorities. One of the most popular works of the late Enlightenment was a collective work edited by the man named the Abbe Rinal, which is called The History of the Two Indies. And that is a book which is deeply, deeply critical of European imperialism. At the same time, at the same of the enlightenment, a lot the works of history written during the Enlightment. Tended, such as Voltaire's essay on customs, which I just mentioned, tend to give a kind of very linear version of history. They suggest that all societies follow the same path, from sort of primitive savagery, hunter-gatherers, through early agriculture, feudal stages, and on into sort of modern commercial society and civilization. And so they're basically saying, okay, we, the Europeans, are the most advanced. People like the Africans and the Native Americans are the least advanced, and so perhaps we're justified in going and quote, bringing our civilization to them, what later generations would call the civilizing missions, or possibly just, you know, going over and exploiting them because we are stronger and we are more, and again, we are the best. And then there's another thing that the Enlightenment did. The Enlightenment tended to destroy an older Christian view of humankind, which in some ways militated against modern racism. Christians believed, of course, that everyone was the same from Adam and Eve, which meant that there was an essential similarity in the world. And the Enlightenment challenged this by challenging the biblical kind of creation. The Enlightenment challenges this. Voltaire, for instance, believed that there had actually been several different human species that had different origins, and that can very easily become a justification for racism. Buffon, one of the most Figures of the French Enlightenment, one of the early naturalists, was crucial for trying to show that in fact nature is not static, that nature is always changing, that species are changing, including human beings. And so again, that allowed people to think in terms of human beings at different stages of evolution, and perhaps this would be a justification for privileging the more advanced humans over the less advanced. In the 18th century itself, most of these things remain potential, rather than really being acted upon. But in the 19th century, figures of writers who would draw upon these things certainly went much further, and these became justifications for slavery, imperialism, and other things. So again, the Enlightenment is the source of a great deal of stuff here, and you can't simply put it into one box or more.Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier, David, that Concorda wrote one of the later classics of the... Condorcet? Sorry, Condorcets, excuse my French. Condorcès wrote one the later Classics of the Enlightenment when he was hiding from the French Revolution. In your mind, was the revolution itself the natural conclusion, climax? Perhaps anti-climax of the Enlightenment. Certainly, it seems as if a lot of the critiques of the French Revolution, particularly the more conservative ones, Burke comes to mind, suggested that perhaps the principles of in the Enlightment inevitably led to the guillotine, or is that an unfair way of thinking of it?David Bell: Well, there are a lot of people who have thought like that. Edmund Burke already, writing in 1790, in his reflections on the revolution in France, he said that everything which was great in the old regime is being dissolved and, quoting, dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. And then he said about the French that in the groves of their academy at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing but the Gallows. So there, in 1780, he already seemed to be predicting the reign of terror and blaming it. A certain extent from the Enlightenment. That said, I think, you know, again, the French Revolution is incredibly complicated event. I mean, you certainly have, you know, an explosion of what we could call Enlightenment thinking all over the place. In France, it happened in France. What happened there was that you had a, you know, the collapse of an extraordinarily inefficient government and a very, you know, in a very antiquated, paralyzed system of government kind of collapsed, created a kind of political vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped a lot of figures who were definitely readers of the Enlightenment. Oh so um but again the Enlightment had I said I don't think you can call the Enlightement a single thing so to say that the Enlightiment inspired the French Revolution rather than the There you go.Andrew Keen: Although your essay on liberties is the Enlightenment then and now you probably didn't write is always these lazy editors who come up with inaccurate and inaccurate titles. So for you, there is no such thing as the Enlighten.David Bell: No, there is. There is. But still, it's a complex thing. It contains multitudes.Andrew Keen: So it's the Enlightenment rather than the United States.David Bell: Conflicting tendencies, it has contradictions within it. There's enough unity to refer to it as a singular noun, but it doesn't mean that it all went in one single direction.Andrew Keen: But in historical terms, did the failure of the French Revolution, its descent into Robespierre and then Bonaparte, did it mark the end in historical terms a kind of bookend of history? You began in 1720 by 1820. Was the age of the Enlightenment pretty much over?David Bell: I would say yes. I think that, again, one of the things about the French Revolution is that people who are reading these books and they're reading these ideas and they are discussing things really start to act on them in a very different way from what it did before the French revolution. You have a lot of absolute monarchs who are trying to bring certain enlightenment principles to bear in their form of government, but they're not. But it's difficult to talk about a full-fledged attempt to enact a kind of enlightenment program. Certainly a lot of the people in the French Revolution saw themselves as doing that. But as they did it, they ran into reality, I would say. I mean, now Tocqueville, when he writes his old regime in the revolution, talks about how the French philosophes were full of these abstract ideas that were divorced from reality. And while that's an exaggeration, there was a certain truth to them. And as soon as you start having the age of revolutions, as soon you start people having to devise systems of government that will actually last, and as you have people, democratic representative systems that will last, and as they start revising these systems under the pressure of actual events, then you're not simply talking about an intellectual movement anymore, you're talking about something very different. And so I would say that, well, obviously the ideas of the Enlightenment continue to inspire people, the books continue to be read, debated. They lead on to figures like Kant, and as we talked about earlier, Kant leads to Hegel, Hegel leads to Marx in a certain sense. Nonetheless, by the time you're getting into the 19th century, what you have, you know, has connections to the Enlightenment, but can we really still call it the Enlightment? I would sayAndrew Keen: And Tocqueville, of course, found democracy in America. Is democracy itself? I know it's a big question. But is it? Bound up in the Enlightenment. You've written extensively, David, both for liberties and elsewhere on liberalism. Is the promise of democracy, democratic systems, the one born in the American Revolution, promised in the French Revolution, not realized? Are they products of the Enlightment, or is the 19th century and the democratic systems that in the 19th century, is that just a separate historical track?David Bell: Again, I would say there are certain things in the Enlightenment that do lead in that direction. Certainly, I think most figures in the enlightenment in one general sense or another accepted the idea of a kind of general notion of popular sovereignty. It didn't mean that they always felt that this was going to be something that could necessarily be acted upon or implemented in their own day. And they didn't necessarily associate generalized popular sovereignty with what we would now call democracy with people being able to actually govern themselves. Would be certain figures, certainly Diderot and some of his essays, what we saw very much in the social contract, you know, were sketching out, you knows, models for possible democratic system. Condorcet, who actually lived into the French Revolution, wrote one of the most draft constitutions for France, that's one of most democratic documents ever proposed. But of course there were lots of figures in the Enlightenment, Voltaire, and others who actually believed much more in absolute monarchy, who believed that you just, you know, you should have. Freedom of speech and freedom of discussion, out of which the best ideas would emerge, but then you had to give those ideas to the prince who imposed them by poor sicknesses.Andrew Keen: And of course, Rousseau himself, his social contract, some historians have seen that as the foundations of totalitarian, modern totalitarianism. Finally, David, your wonderful essay in Liberties in the spring quarterly 2025 is The Enlightenment, Then and Now. What about now? You work at Princeton, your president has very bravely stood up to the new presidential regime in the United States, in defense of academic intellectual freedom. Does the word and the movement, does it have any relevance in the 2020s, particularly in an age of neo-authoritarianism around the world?David Bell: I think it does. I think we have to be careful about it. I always get a little nervous when people say, well, we should simply go back to the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenments is history. We don't go back the 18th century. I think what we need to do is to recover certain principles, certain ideals from the 18 century, the ones that matter to us, the ones we think are right, and make our own Enlightenment better. I don't think we need be governed by the 18 century. Thomas Paine once said that no generation should necessarily rule over every generation to come, and I think that's probably right. Unfortunately in the United States, we have a constitution which is now essentially unamendable, so we're doomed to live by a constitution largely from the 18th century. But are there many things in the Enlightenment that we should look back to, absolutely?Andrew Keen: Well, David, I am going to free you for your own French Enlightenment. You can go and have some croissant now in your local cafe in Paris. Thank you so much for a very, I excuse the pun, enlightening conversation on the Enlightenment then and now, Essential Essay in Liberties. I'd love to get you back on the show. Talk more history. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

A new group of self-described leftist Mormons have written a manifesto attempting to reconcile their Marxist views and their alleged Mormon faith.

We're catching up on some news tonight, and we have a really rich call in topic to boot! A triggered lady-astronaut revealed why the use of the words like 'mankind' underscore the importance of sending a capsule of obnoxious female celebrities into space...and it ties directly into the push-back against tariffs by mainstream Marxists. There is nagging question about the future of work itself: if most jobs are made obsolete, and if most utilities are made infinitely less expensive. What would you do with all of that free time? Unleash Your Brain w/ Keto Brainz Nootropic Promo code FRANKLY: https://tinyurl.com/2cess6y7 Read This Month's Newsletter: https://t.co/eMCYWuTi6p Elevation Blend Coffee & Official QF Mugs: https://www.coffeerevolution.shop/category/quite-frankly Official QF Apparel: https://tinyurl.com/f3kbkr4s Sponsor The Show and Get VIP Perks: https://www.quitefrankly.tv/sponsor One-Time Tip: http://www.paypal.me/QuiteFranklyLive Send Holiday cards, Letters, and other small gifts, to the Quite Frankly P.O. Box! 15 East Putnam Ave, #356 Greenwich, CT, 06830 Send Crypto: BTC: 1EafWUDPHY6y6HQNBjZ4kLWzQJFnE5k9PK Leave a Voice Mail: https://www.speakpipe.com/QuiteFrankly Quite Frankly Socials: Twitter/X: @QuiteFranklyTV Instagram: @QuiteFranklyOfficial Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/KCdh92Fn GUILDED Chat: https://tinyurl.com/kzrk6nxa Official Forum: https://tinyurl.com/k89p88s8 Telegram: https://t.me/quitefranklytv Truth: @QuiteFrankly GETTR: @QuiteFrankly MINDS: @QuiteFrankly Gab: @QuiteFrankly Streaming Live On: QuiteFrankly.tv (Powered by Foxhole) Youtube: https://tinyurl.com/yc2cn395 BitChute: https://tinyurl.com/46dfca5c Rumble: https://tinyurl.com/yeytwwyz Kick: https://kick.com/quitefranklytv Audio On Demand: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/301gcES iTunes: http://apple.co/2dMURMq Amazon: https://amzn.to/3afgEXZ SoundCloud: https://tinyurl.com/yc44m474

Richard Wolff is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor at The New School, where he works on economics in the Marxist tradition. This is Richard's eighth appearance on Robinson's Podcast. In his last appearance, episode #243, he and Robinson discussed 2025 and the first weeks of Trump's presidency, as well as what's to come. More particularly, they discuss the irrelevance of Donald Trump, his domestic and global policies, China, narratives on the right and left, and the future of the United States. In this episode, they continue the discussion by diving deeper into recent events, Doge, Elon Musk, the relationship between Trump and Hitler, and important historical Marxists. Richard's latest book is Understanding Capitalism (Democracy at Work, 2024).Understanding Capitalism (Book): https://www.democracyatwork.info/understanding_capitalismRichard's Website: https://www.rdwolff.comEconomic Update: https://www.democracyatwork.info/economicupdateOUTLINE00:00:00 Introduction00:01:27 What Do Trump and Hitler Have in Common?00:09:42 Is This the Democratic Party's Worst Crisis?00:14:58 Is Trump's Economic Policy a Hail Mary?00:26:29 The Mexican Deportation Crisis00:30:19 Global Retaliation Against American Tariffs00:33:29 America's Big Mistake with Russian Sanctions00:40:50 Trump's Big TikTok Mistake00:47:05 How Adolf Hitler Came to Power in Germany01:08:40 Does Elon Musk Symbolize the End of America?01:16:07 How Bosses Lie When They Fire You01:23:08 On Elon Musk's Chainsaw Public Relations Disaster01:28:52 On the Drowning American Empire01:34:36 On Elon Musk and the Self-Destruction of Tesla01:39:27 Feudalism, Communism, and the Death of Capitalism01:46:22 Does China Represent a New Breed of Capitalism?01:55:16 What Can the United States Do to Beat China?02:03:46 What Makes Mao an Important Marxist?02:17:56 Richard Wolff's Mediocre Ivy League Education02:23:59 How Mao Made the China of Today02:40:39 The Myth of European Global Dominance02:52:08 On Antonio Gramsci and Mussolini02:57:03 Why Is Gramsci One of the Great Marxists?Robinson's Website: http://robinsonerhardt.comRobinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro warned Trump that the Biden Administration pressured him to send Tren de Aragua foot soldiers who are committed Marxists to the USA, and even helped them get here. Leaked classified intel shows there may be some truth to that. (Please subscribe & share.) Sources: https://www.emerald.tv/p/did-venezuela-invade-america-in-secret

On this episode of The Nation Podcast, Vincent Bevins joins D.D. Guttenplan to talk about the MST.Read Vincent's story here.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Voice Of GO(r)D podcast was recently contacted by a representative of the American Communist Party, seeking more information about trucking and truckers, with a particular focus on truckers in Canada. As this podcast is happy to speak with (almost) anyone, I was happy to hear from someone on the opposite side of the bottom of the horseshoe to myself, and I thus invited Timmy onto the show in what is something of a two way interview - she asking me about trucking, and me asking her many questions about her communist ideological priors.I know many people who follow me might be aghast at the idea of speaking to a ‘Commie' but I think our highly volatile political discourse landscape obscures definitions and forgets that not all stereotypes apply. As I mention to Timmy on the show, when I became a bit more well known for defending the Freedom Convoy, the very first people to seek my input on the reality of the Convoy and its class composition were legitimate working class Marxists, not the obese purple haired maniacs whose brains have been fried by Identity Politics and The Borg™️. It seems like Timmy and her comrades in the American Communist Party, like myself, want nothing to do with that nonsense, and would rather focus on the material improvement of working people, including truckers.Throughout the discussion, we discuss the particularities of wage suppression in trucking, the abuse of migrants by policies pushed by Mega Carriers, as well as indentured servitude programs run by their own co-ethnic gangsters, the history of Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, and much else. I mention this great book about Hoffa in the show, and you ought to read it.Timmy recently appeared on a Twitter space with fellow trucking media Internet Niche Micro Celebrity Timothy Dooner, where they discussed the ACP employing the term ‘MAGA Communism'. A complimentary and interesting discussion, which you can listen to here.As you know, I'm working on a book titled “End Of The Road - Inside The War on Truckers” and you can find out more about that here -https://autonomoustruckers.substack.com/p/book-project-announcement-and-a-majorAs always - questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and strongly encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com

By their nature, free markets promote harmony between people and increase overall standards of living. This view is radically different from the ones promoted by Marxists who believe that only “class interests” matter.Original article: Free Markets Promote Peaceful Cooperation and Racial Harmony

Spencer Leonard discusses the Frankfurt School's Marxism, how these Marxists are still relevant to us today, and explains Horkheimer's "Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Epoch." Support Sublation Media and Listen to the Second Half:https://patreon.com/dietsoap

By their nature, free markets promote harmony between people and increase overall standards of living. This view is radically different from the ones promoted by Marxists who believe that only “class interests” matter.Original article: Free Markets Promote Peaceful Cooperation and Racial Harmony

By now, many of you know the Climate Change agenda is not really about saving the world from anything. It's about control, reducing personal freedom, exacerbating inflation, usurping property rights, and redefining social justice, equity, and equality all while lining certain politicians' and advocates' pockets. Interestingly, the movement has roots within the early Marxists of the late 19th century.Brian Sussman, author of Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty, and Property, talks with Dr. Jerome Corsi on The Truth Central to look deeply into the origins and true intentions of the Climate Change Alarmist Agenda, its Marxist origins, its masters' intent to destroy free nations and how it became a cult today with worshippers who will blindly defend their leaders' words despite truthful evidence to the contrary.Visit The Corsi Nation website: https://www.corsination.comIf you like what we are doing, please support our Sponsors:Get RX Meds Now: https://www.getrxmedsnow.comMyVitalC https://www.thetruthcentral.com/myvitalc-ess60-in-organic-olive-oil/Swiss America: https://www.swissamerica.com/offer/CorsiRMP.phpGet Dr. Corsi's new book, The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis: Forensic Analysis of the JFK Autopsy X-Rays Proves Two Headshots from the Right Front and One from the Rear, here: https://www.amazon.com/Assassination-President-John-Kennedy-Headshots/dp/B0CXLN1PX1/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20W8UDU55IGJJ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ymVX8y9V--_ztRoswluApKEN-WlqxoqrowcQP34CE3HdXRudvQJnTLmYKMMfv0gMYwaTTk_Ne3ssid8YroEAFg.e8i1TLonh9QRzDTIJSmDqJHrmMTVKBhCL7iTARroSzQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=jerome+r.+corsi+%2B+jfk&qid=1710126183&sprefix=%2Caps%2C275&sr=8-1Join Dr. Jerome Corsi on Substack: https://jeromecorsiphd.substack.com/Visit The Truth Central website: https://www.thetruthcentral.comGet your FREE copy of Dr. Corsi's new book with Swiss America CEO Dean Heskin, How the Coming Global Crash Will Create a Historic Gold Rush by calling: 800-519-6268Follow Dr. Jerome Corsi on X: @corsijerome1Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/corsi-nation--5810661/support.

An unelected Marxist Judge today said that 'Nazis got better treatment' than the Venezuelan gang members got under the Alien Enemies Act deportations. In what world do these unelected career bureaucrats live in? These gang members come to this country illegally, commit crimes and they are suppose to be paraded ? As these Marxists look to fight the Trump agenda, DJT has secured trillion of dollars of pledged investments in America along with companies vowing to move production back to America!Guest: Mark Mitchell - Rasmussen ReportsSponsor:My PillowWww.MyPillow.com/johnSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Bullfighting: Savage. Interesting calls on health. Anti-2A news. Chemtrails? What truth Trump exposes…The Hake Report, Thursday, March 27, 2025 ADTIMESTAMPS* (0:00:00) Start: Shoutout to the Internet* (0:03:41) Yemen group chat drama: CNN* (0:07:01) Newsflash! Covid is over! … more on Internet* (0:10:32) Hey, guys! Hake tee, Cameos* (0:13:35) ALEX, CA: Bullfighting savagery* (0:16:54) ALEX: George Foreman died young; brain health* (0:25:10) DAVID, TX: Art; Covid, LA Times owner* (0:35:50) Supers… email; Greggatron* (0:40:44) Ghost guns: Supreme Court 7-2 against 2A* (0:54:35) ROBERT, KS: Armorer* (0:59:29) ROBERT: Geoengineering, will Trump admit contrails?* (1:05:15) ROBERT: Longevity, XX vs XY, men vs women* (1:08:49) CARL, Boston: JFK? Bad phone?* (1:09:29) ARDENE, CO: Medical MJ, meds mixing supps, affecting body* (1:22:28) Rumble Rant: 4H kids; FE; JFTV* (1:25:40) Punchie.TV, Jim in AK, 2A* (1:26:49) CARL, MA: Pharma* (1:30:24) CARL: Metals in the sky? 9/11, JFK? Oct 7…* (1:33:54) CARL: Trump vs neo-Marxists* (1:37:39) ALLEN, MI: ATF?!... Biblical war: Dividing the spoils* (1:42:31) ANTHONY, SoCal: Houthi sarkha; Media; 3rd Rail Omar, USA* (1:48:45) ANTHONY: Ancient Egyptians and the Bible* (1:50:46) 16 Horsepower - "American Wheeze" - 1996, Sackcloth 'n' AshesLINKSBLOG https://www.thehakereport.com/blog/2025/3/27/the-hake-report-thu-3-27-25PODCAST / Substack HAKE NEWS from JLP https://www.thehakereport.com/jlp-news/2025/3/27/hake-news-thu-3-27-25Hake is live M-F 9-11a PT (11-1CT/12-2ET) Call-in 1-888-775-3773 https://www.thehakereport.com/showVIDEO YouTube - Rumble* - Facebook - X - BitChute - Odysee*PODCAST Substack - Apple - Spotify - Castbox - Podcast Addict*SUPER CHAT on platforms* above or BuyMeACoffee, etc.SHOP - Printify (new!) - Spring (old!) - Cameo | All My LinksJLP Network:JLP - Church - TFS - Nick - Joel - Punchie Get full access to HAKE at thehakereport.substack.com/subscribe

On Tuesday's Mark Levin Show, Mike Huckabee's confirmation hearing for U.S. ambassador to Israel was minimally covered, with only C-SPAN reporting while network and cable TV ignored it, amid vicious protests from Code Pink and bias from Democrats favoring Hamas. He delivered a masterful lesson on our nation's founding, its connection to God, Judaism, and Christianity, and our ties to Israel. There's growing concern over unprecedented cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea against the U.S., alongside rising antisemitism, which President Trump is trying to address despite resistance from Democrat-appointed judges. Islamists and Marxists have the same goal: the destruction of Western civilization. The U.S. isn't engaging the Houthis over Israel; rather, the Houthis have struck our ships 319 times, constituting clear acts of war. Also, Jim Jordan calls in to address methods for curbing federal judges who act as if they hold presidential authority. He also recounts his memorable experience attending a wrestling match with Trump and highlights Wyatt Hendrickson's incredible victory. Later, the signal leak wasn't good but it's not the crisis of the century. It was a discussion, and no classified information was revealed. Finally, Steve Hilton calls in to discuss his new book, Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America's Worst-Run State. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An unelected Marxist Judge today said that 'Nazis got better treatment' than the Venezuelan gang members got under the Alien Enemies Act deportations. In what world do these unelected career bureaucrats live in? These gang members come to this country illegally, commit crimes and they are suppose to be paraded ? As these Marxists look to fight the Trump agenda, DJT has secured trillion of dollars of pledged investments in America along with companies vowing to move production back to America!Guest: Mark Mitchell - Rasmussen ReportsSponsor:My PillowWww.MyPillow.com/johnSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on the Mark Levin Show, the Constitutional crisis we face right now is coming out of the lower courts of the federal judiciary and it must be stopped. We have a federal Judge who ordered President Trump to call back an airplane that was flying vicious criminals back to El Salvador and we have every right to call these Judges out. When Judges act like politicians they must be criticized. The official position of MAGA: Iran will not get nukes. The President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and National Security Advisor all said in the last 24-36 hours that by hook or by crook, Iran must not and will not get nuclear weapons. A remarkable chapter in space exploration closed with the safe return of 2 astronauts stranded for nine months—a feat made possible by Elon Musk and his SpaceX team. This historic achievement underscores what innovation and determination can accomplish, even as Musk faces unjust criticism and vandalism from the left targeting Tesla. While detractors attack, Musk succeeds where others couldn't, saving two astronauts in a mission prioritized by President Trump. Unelected federal district judges, particularly in Democrat-leaning areas, are overstepping their authority and undermining the separation of powers by issuing vague or overly broad orders that interfere with presidential duties, such as immigration enforcement and border security. This is judicial overreach, unchecked by the Supreme Court or Chief Justice John Roberts, and it threatens the constitutional framework, potentially leading to a judicial oligarchy or tyranny. Also, Sen Bernie Sanders is a Stalinist. To him, the Democratic Party isn't wrong—it's just not committed enough. Why is it acceptable for a man who shares the ideology of Castro and Mao to be treated like just another liberal? Bernie worships Marxism. He uses the language of the Constitution to attack the Constitution, which is typical of Marxists. Also, Musk's legal team should explore filing tortious interference lawsuits against individuals, including members of Congress, who are attempting to undermine Tesla. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Friday's Mark Levin Show, Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Sen Bernie Sanders are staunch Marxists, even though AOC shows she has never deeply read the texts of Marx or Hegel. Marxism is all about slogans, skills Sanders excels at while AOC is still developing. There isn't one place where Marxism has worked, yet this is what they push. Later, there is this fusion between Marxism and Islamism. The People's Forum, a pro-Communist Chinese Party (CCP) Marxist group, is orchestrating protests to free Mahmoud Khalil. The group has ties to radical left-wing organizations like Code Pink and has a history of supporting anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian causes, including celebrating Hamas attacks. Also, the mainstream media is downplaying the fact that Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University student facing deportation by the Trump administration, is the son-in-law of a senior Hamas official, Yousef Saleh. The media portray Suri as merely a researcher or student caught in a legal dispute, ignoring his alleged ties to Hamas and his promotion of antisemitic propaganda on social media. Afterward, Jim Trusty calls in to discuss the Trump administration facing an unprecedented number of legal injunctions, far surpassing those of any previous president. This is the continuing of lawfare. In addition, leftwing conflicted Obama judge, James Boasberg, is looking to hold the Trump administration in contempt. That's what he's doing, and he wants to make a big splash, get lots of media headlines, and try to sabotage the Trump administration. He wants to create the impression that Trump is lawless when, in fact, Boasberg is lawless. He wants to play into the Democrat Party narrative that Trump is a dictator, when it is Boasberg who is the autocrat. Finally, Jim Simpson joins the conversation to talk about his new book, Manufactured Crisis: The War to End America. https://www.amazon.com/Manufactured-Crisis-War-End-America/dp/B0DGD854FS/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week we republish an episode from our international podcast: Against the Stream: Trump's dramatic return to the White House has thrown the liberals into complete panic and confusion. They have flung whatever insults they can at him: from semi-fascist, to fascist, to neo-fascist. To explain how Marxists should understand and approach these phenomena, Alan Woods, the leading theoretician of the Revolutionary Communist International, joined Hamid Alizadeh for another episode of Against the Stream, the weekly current affairs podcast of the RCI. This episode premiered on YouTube. Tune in every Thursday at 6pm GMT. Books mentioned in the episode can be purchased on: https://www.marxistbooks.com/ ✊ Join the fight against capitalism: https://communistusa.org/join

On Wednesday's Mark Levin Show, unelected federal district judges, particularly in Democrat-leaning areas, are overstepping their authority and undermining the separation of powers by issuing vague or overly broad orders that interfere with presidential duties, such as immigration enforcement and border security. This is judicial overreach, unchecked by the Supreme Court or Chief Justice John Roberts, and it threatens the constitutional framework, potentially leading to a judicial oligarchy or tyranny. The judiciary needs to respect the elected executive branch, and the Supreme Court needs to intervene and uphold constitutional principles. These federal judges are acting beyond their role, not just interpreting laws but effectively rewriting the Constitution. These are rogue judges or ‘rewriters' who are overstepping their authority and undermining the judicial system's purpose. Also, Sen Bernie Sanders is a Stalinist. To him, the Democratic Party isn't wrong—it's just not committed enough. Why is it acceptable for a man who shares the ideology of Castro and Mao to be treated like just another liberal? Bernie worships Marxism. He uses the language of the Constitution to attack the Constitution, which is typical of Marxists. Finally, Josh Hammer calls in to discuss his new book, Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West. https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Civilization-Jewish-Nation-Destiny/dp/1635769736/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Dean's List with Host Dean Bowen – Maine stands to lose over $700,000 in federal funding because they refuse to follow the anti-discrimination laws of Title IX while Columbia is losing over $400 million for not stopping antisemitism on campus. Almost 80% of the country is adamantly opposed to men playing in women's sports, but the government of Maine continues to defy what its citizens want..

Read Cedric's work here: https://nonsite.org/the-wrong-duree-the-politics-of.../   Does capitalism need to racialized to be properly understood? Was the late Cedric Johnson correct when he felt Marxists, even Black Marxists betrayed the Black radical tradition with their ideologies? We'll discuss.   Check out our new bi-weekly series, "The Crisis Papers" here: https://www.patreon.com/bitterlakepresents/shop   Thank you guys again for taking the time to check this out. We appreciate each and everyone of you. If you have the means, and you feel so inclined,   BECOME A PATRON! We're creating patron only programing, you'll get bonus content from many of the episodes, and you get MERCH!   Become a patron now https://www.patreon.com/join/BitterLakePresents?   Please also like, subscribe, and follow us on these platforms as well, (specially YouTube!)   THANKS Y'ALL   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG9WtLyoP9QU8sxuIfxk3eg Twitch: www.twitch.tv/thisisrevolutionpodcast www.twitch.tv/leftflankvets​ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Thisisrevolutionpodcast/ Twitter: @TIRShowOakland Instagram: @thisisrevolutionoakland   Read Jason Myles in Sublation Magazine https://www.sublationmag.com/writers/jason-myles   Read Jason Myles in Damage Magazine https://damagemag.com/2023/11/07/the-man-who-sold-the-world/

On Friday's Mark Levin Show, President Trump put the hammer down on Iran, Russia, and the Hitler youth protestors at colleges and universities. Trump is adopting an aggressive and strategic approach to both foreign and domestic challenges. He is pressuring Russia and Ukraine to negotiate an end to their war with sanctions and diplomacy, while simultaneously threatening Iran if it does not agree to a nuclear deal. Domestically, he is taking a strong stance against antisemitic university protestors.  The Trump administration is taking actions that the Biden administration wouldn't. We see Hitler youth antisemitism in the streets, and Trump is stepping up to address it. The Trump administration has canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University due to "inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students." Also, over the last seven or eight years, China has significantly muscled up and is now a serious force. Billions of dollars have been spent on everything except the U.S. military, but Trump will fix that. Later, it's fine to have people with strong opinions, but the hosts on The View are unhinged radicals. They constantly cross the line, with Sunny Hostin leading the pack as the worst offender. ABC News apparently has no issue with her calling for people to fight and die. Hostin needs to be fired for pushing violence like that. Finally, Kevin McCarthy calls in to explain that the Democrats are in chaos, fighting an internal civil war with no clear leader in the House, even after the election. In California, Gavin Newsom's presidential ambitions have him clashing with the party by opposing men in women's sports, fueling the divide. The split isn't just left versus hard left—there are no moderates anymore, just Marxists and socialists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Mark Levin Show, if you want to learn about birthright citizenship, the wrong place to go is the Sunday shows. Listen to this show if you want to understand the 14th Amendment, its history, what it was based on, and the people who were involved. Margaret Brennan is on Face The Nation to advance her leftwing ideology. She claims a Reagan Judge in Seattle shot down the Trump executive order on birthright citizenship. That Judge was appointed by Reagan as part of a compromise. President Trump has come into office and wants to slash the government and control the bureaucracy. But the swamp doesn't allow the people's will to take hold. We have a massive federal government, and it grows and grows. The judiciary has become an arm of a massive, centralized government, protecting its interests against Trump. Judge Loren AliKhan, a Biden appointed Judge, temporarily blocked Trump's plan to pause federal aid spending. AliKhan is an extremist leftist who thinks she can decide what the President can do or not. The war against President Trump has not stopped. We can't let our guard down; he still has a whole bunch of cabinet nominees that have not yet been confirmed. Trump should get the people he wants, but the Democrats will try and stop all of them. The Democrat Party rejects the Judeo-Christian principles upon which this nation was founded; they promote the ideas of the Marxist. The Democrat Party hasn't changed, and they won't because it is an anti-American ideological operation. Why do we believe that when government does something it's better than the private sector? Also, stop using the phrase big pharma; we all sound like Marxists. Little pharma can't produce the medicine you're taking. Many of us wouldn't be alive but for big pharma. If we break them up, then nobody going to invest in the medicines we need. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Thursday's Mark Levin Show, Democrats in Congress are more upset with what President Trump said about DEI than the crash that happened near Reagan National Airport. Accidents like this happen when the government wastes trillions of dollars on their left-wing woke demands instead of dealing with a staffing shortage at the air traffic control towers. The ideology of the left is killing people. If the government is going to run air traffic, they better do it right. Why do we believe that when government does something it's better than the private sector? Also, stop using the phrase big pharma; we all sound like Marxists. Little pharma can't produce the medicine you're taking. Many of us wouldn't be alive but for big pharma. If we break them up, then nobody going to invest in the medicines we need. Can you imagine the disaster if the government was in charge? Afterward, Sen Thom Tillis convinced Pete Hegseth's ex-sister-in-law to come out against Hegseth to convince Republicans Senators to vote no on his nomination. Thankfully, it backfired. Why did Tillis vote for Hegseth after he tried to do all this damage? Now, those in North Carolina know who he really is. Finally, Rep James Comer calls in to discuss his investigation into sanctuary cities and his new book, All the President's Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich. https://www.amazon.com/All-Presidents-Money-Investigating-Foreign/dp/0063420015 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices