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South Korean President Lee Jae Myung is losing sleep. That’s what he told a crowd on Juju Island earlier this week while discussing the consequences, for his economy, of the U.S. and Israel’s attacks on Iran. “This latest war in the Middle East has made it clear that the energy transition—that is, the major shift to renewable energy—is no longer a national and historical task that can be postponed,” he said. Continuing to rely on imported fossil fuels, he warned, “makes the future very dangerous.”It’s not uncommon for climate advocates to pitch renewables as a boon for national security: No one controls the sun and the wind, after all, and, once solar and wind farms are installed, the electricity they provide does not rely on volatile global energy markets. America’s and Israel’s disastrous war of choice against Iran and neighboring countries is helping prove the point. Iran has kept the Strait of Hormuz—the world’s most important passageway for oil, gas, and a host of other vital commodities—closed for the last month. Prices at the pump have climbed to more than $4 a gallon in the U.S. Life here otherwise, however, although pricier, has so far continued more or less as normal. That’s partially because we’re a net exporter of oil and a major gas producer. Asian countries, many of which are net importers of both oil and gas, face a much deeper crisis. Some 90 percent of the oil and gas that usually flows through the Strait is bound for the region. South Korea, for instance, imports 94 percent of its energy; nearly two-thirds of its crude oil comes from the Persian Gulf. While policies to boost renewables and cut oil and gas use have rapidly fallen out of favor in the U.S., some of the world’s largest and most dynamic economies are increasingly treating them as necessities for economic stability and national security. A series of recent energy deals helps illustrate that divergence. Onstage at an oil and gas conference last week, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced that the U.S. government would pay TotalEnergies $1 billion to cancel a pair of wind farms the company had planned to build off the East Coast. In exchange, the French company—which has made another $1 billion betting on the last month’s turmoil—agreed to build more gas-fired power plants here, produce more oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and construct a liquefied natural gas export facility in Texas. In Vietnam, by contrast, the energy conglomerate Vingroup JSC this week proposed scrapping its planned LNG-to-power facility and replacing it with one that would use solar and wind power paired with battery storage. “In addition to cost factors,” Vingroup wrote in a letter to the Vietnamese government, “dependence on imported fuel also poses considerable challenges to energy security, supply autonomy, and Vietnam’s ability to control electricity generation costs.”For energy analysts, these sorts of announcements are a sign of things to come. Sam Reynolds, a research lead with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, or IEEFA, calls the news “probably the most tangible sign yet that LNG has lost ground as a viable transition fuel for Asian economies.” Prospects for just such a gas-heavy transition raised high hopes among gas-exporting countries. Vietnam’s energy demand has grown by more than 7 percent a year over the last decade, with gross domestic product growing by 8 percent annually over the same period. Gas exporters in the Gulf and the United States both saw a prospective payday in that country’s attempts to transition away from coal, which meets around half of primary energy demand for its 102 million people. Despite ambitious plans to build out a fleet of LNG-to-power projects as part of that transition, though, just a single plant has been built amid struggles to court investors and negotiate power-purchasing agreements. Moves like this raise a scary prospect for fuel exporters: “demand destruction.” Since the crisis started, several countries have instituted creative measures to slash demand for imported oil and gas. Thailand generates roughly two-thirds of its power from gas. Prices for Thailand to secure shipments of LNG—which accounts for 27 percent of the country’s total gas supply—have surged by an estimated 125 percent. As temperatures hover around 100 degrees in Bangkok, the government has accordingly urged people there to keep their air conditioning set at 79 degrees and ordered civil servants to work from home. Sri Lanka has designated all Wednesdays public holidays. The government of the Philippines—where petrol prices have jumped more than 50 percent over the last month—has declared a national energy emergency.As the crisis grinds on, countries could make more permanent shifts. The Philippines is looking to fast-track grid entry for 12 solar projects, collectively bringing nearly 1.3 gigawatts of additional power online this month. The country’s state-owned pension fund is also offering $8,300 solar loans for its members to buy and install solar power. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank announced it will look to accelerate cleaner energy adoption in the name of increasing self-sufficiency.On the face of it, these efforts to reduce oil and gas demand would seem like good news for the climate. But the reality is a little more complex. Many countries have paired conservation measures and announced renewables build-outs with rapidly increasing coal usage. Thailand’s national electric utility, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, or EGAT, has ordered the restart of 0.6 GW of coal power. South Korea, which is looking to subsidize public transit to curb gasoline demand, lifted caps on generating electricity from coal. Japan is now allowing less-efficient coal plants to feed power into the grid so as to offset demand for gas, which supplies about a third of the country’s energy demand. India, where electricity usage is surging to record highs, could see coal usage meet a record 283 GW of demand as temperatures continue to rise. As China continues to expand its renewables generation capacity at a rapid clip, the country is likewise firing up its enormous fleet of coal plants, which have been operating well below capacity. Shelling out to keep aging coal plants online isn’t exactly a long-term solution, though. Coal prices are rising as demand spikes too, and big regional producers like Indonesia are looking to prioritize domestic customers over foreign buyers. Despite relatively high up-front costs for bigger projects, renewables build-outs have become a more attractive option thanks to the plummeting cost of solar panels produced by China. Pakistan faces a dire energy crisis like its neighbors, but has been somewhat insulated thanks to the fact that it now generates roughly 30 percent of its energy from renewables, up from just 3 percent in 2020. Since 2023, the country has imported a whopping 41 GW worth of solar panels from China. A recent report found that Pakistan had avoided more than $12 billion worth of oil and gas imports between 2021 and February 2026.As even longtime U.S. allies scramble to secure deals with Iran to allow tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, more countries could sour on the idea that relying on fuel imports from either the U.S. or the Gulf is a realistic way to meet their growing economies’ energy needs. The war in Iran is accelerating some kind of energy transition. It probably isn’t the one that climate activists had in mind.

Grassroots rebellions against AI data centers are sweeping the country. The backlash cuts across partisan lines, and the political class is scrambling to catch up. As politicians rush to stake out positions, though, they risk obliterating a crucial component of the movement’s strength. These local coalitions’ holds aren’t succeeding because they’re progressive or conservative. They’re succeeding because they draw on a political grammar that predates and exceeds the progressive tradition. And progressives might do well not to squander this rare opportunity by branding it.Last week, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez formally introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. The bill would halt new data center construction until Congress enacts federal protections for workers, consumers, and the environment. The impulse is sound, and the national attention is welcome. But the legislative language leans heavily on wealth redistribution, labor displacement, and climate justice. While that’s one way to argue for a pause, it’s not the argument that’s actually winning in the places where data centers get built. The bill frames the moratorium in terms of national priorities, including worker protections, environmental safeguards, and distributive fairness. Local opponents usually frame it more plainly, focusing on water, land, electricity, and control. The contrast is not ideological but procedural; less a dispute about values than about who gets to decide.The communities with the most at stake are not in Silicon Valley or Brooklyn. They are in small towns like Caledonia, Wisconsin and Granbury, Texas, and in rural counties like mine in North Carolina. In Michigan, a Republican state representative led a bipartisan moratorium effort. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis proposed giving local communities authority to limit new construction. The Missouri Farm Bureau has argued that rural voices must govern expansion on farmland. These are not progressive institutions.There is, however, a distinctly anti-elite, anti-authoritarian flavor to the backlash. As Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback put it: “They’re not building an AI data center next door to Mar-a-Lago. They’re building AI data centers in our agricultural communities like Loxahatchee, like Fort Meade.”What unites these voices isn’t a shared position on labor policy or climate change. It’s a more fundamental conviction: Decisions should be made by the people who have to live with the consequences. The farmer whose well competes with a cooling system, the family whose electric bill doubles, the county commission that must weigh tax revenue against aquifer depletion: These are the people who bear the costs if the decision is wrong. The principle that those most affected should have the strongest voice in deliberation isn’t, in this case, flowing from political theory—but rather from the intuition that makes self-governance feel legitimate in the first place.Liza Featherstone, writing for The New Republic in February, was right to highlight that the rebellion “cuts across partisan lines.” The question worth pressing further is whether conservative participation reflects mere tactical overlap or something more durable. I’d argue it’s the latter. When rural Republicans show up at zoning hearings to oppose data centers, they’re not borrowing progressive language or stumbling into alignment with the left. They’re invoking something older: the belief that outside capital does not get to impose irreversible consequences on a community without that community’s consent. The insistence that those who bear the consequences should hold meaningful authority in the decision is doing the real work here, allowing actors with otherwise incompatible policy commitments to remain aligned long enough to act together.The standard rebuttal, offered with equal enthusiasm by President Donald Trump’s interior secretary, Doug Burgum, and titularly Democratic Senator John Fetterman, is that a moratorium would surrender America’s lead in AI to China. The argument sounds serious. It is not. Countries around the world, China included, are grappling with what this technology will do to their people, their land, and their labor markets. As demonstrated at the Paris AI Summit last year, many are looking for someone to take credible first steps toward collective governance. A moratorium is not a retreat from leadership. It is a claim to a different kind of leadership: the willingness to slow down long enough to ask whether the next step should be taken.The deeper issue is what kind of society we become if we don’t. The race-to-deploy logic treats speed as the only value and communities as obstacles to be managed. That is not a vision of technological progress. It is a vision of technological imposition, one that differs from classic twentieth-century authoritarian models only in its corporate rather than state sponsorship. This is why the local fights matter beyond their immediate geography. Last month, in Lee County, North Carolina, nearly 200 residents packed a commissioners’ meeting to demand a moratorium on what would be the only fracking-powered data center in the United States, a proposal to drill into unstable ground above unmapped coal mines to fuel servers for a crypto-mining operation. Lee County isn’t just deciding about their aquifer. They’re determining whether anyone besides tech companies gets a say at all. The better answer to China is not to match its indifference to local communities. It is to demonstrate what authoritarian states cannot: that a free people can govern powerful technology through legitimate deliberation rather than fiat, whether that fiat comes from a politburo or a board of directors.The politicians on both sides of the aisle racing to support AI risk repeating a familiar pattern. The free trade agreements of the 1990s were justified as necessary for national competitiveness, but the communities that would lose their manufacturing base were not meaningfully consulted. The furniture and textile factories that employed generations of my family and neighbors never returned. These job losses became what one study calls the “economic underpinnings of the drug epidemic” in small towns. The fallout reshaped the electorate in ways that still destabilize American politics. Insisting that rural counties be allowed to pause and debate before their tax dollars, water, and electricity subsidize the very data centers fueling the next major displacement is not Luddism. It is a refusal to repeat a procedural failure that treated loss as something to be managed rather than decided.The Sanders-AOC bill may not pass this Congress. But the local moratoriums will keep coming, and the coalitions behind them will keep growing. The bill’s value may lie less in its legislative prospects than in the legitimacy it confers on a movement that was already winning without federal sponsorship. The question now is whether that movement’s energy gets channeled into a framework capacious enough to hold its full coalition, or whether it narrows into something that feels, to rural conservatives, like someone else’s cause.A moratorium is not a white flag. It is not an especially progressive idea. It is what happens when a free country still believes powerful technology must answer to the people whose land, water, and economies it reshapes. Mis-frame that principle as partisan, and the coalition fractures. Lose the coalition, and the decision defaults back to those with the least at stake in its consequences.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. Democrats are pushing a variety of new tax ideas. Party officials at the state and federal levels are proposing big hikes on income taxes for the wealthy. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have rolled out new versions of their wealth tax proposals. Activists are trying to get a measure on California’s ballot that would impose a one-time wealth tax on billionaires there. Meanwhile, some of these same Democrats are also pushing tax cuts. Senators Cory Booker and Chris Hollen want to drastically cut taxes for the middle and working classes, while Georgia gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms is proposing to exempt teachers from paying state income taxes. Bharat Ramamurti, who worked on Warren’s 2020 campaign before taking a senior post in the Biden White House, says that the tax increase proposals are strong and much-needed. But in the latest edition of Right Now, he raises some concerns about the tax cuts as being too large and potentially leaving too little money for more urgent priorities, such as restoring Medicaid funding that has been cut by the Trump administration.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 1 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: There’s all this tax news on the Democratic side—big tax plans, federal, state, wealth taxes, tax cuts. So I want to talk to somebody who really knows about tax policy. I have a great guest today, Bharat Ramamurti. He was the NEC deputy director in the Biden administration. He was an adviser on Senator Warren’s campaign. Great guy, expert on a lot of issues, so welcome.Bharat Ramamurti: Thank you for having me.Bacon: So I want to start with Washington state this week. The governor signed a 9.9 percent tax on income over $1 million a year. Washington had no income tax before, but you’re seeing a lot of these taxes on the wealthy in states that are happening. New York is considering one. Massachusetts passed one—a 4 percent tax a couple years ago—and that has ended up funding a lot of important stuff there.I think the question here is—even some conservative Democrats will say these tax increases will mean the wealthy move out of your state and you’ll end up with a net reduction in income. So talk about why these kinds of tax increases are good.Ramamurti: Look, there’s a pretty robust body of research about whether wealthy people respond to tax increases like this by moving out of state. And the empirical literature suggests that it’s pretty infrequent—or at least that it’s infrequent enough such that the new revenue you get by imposing higher taxes on that group of people more than offsets any loss of revenue from those people leaving the state.You mentioned the Massachusetts one. There’s good empirical research about what happened following the imposition of that sort of millionaire’s tax in Massachusetts. There was relatively little evidence of out-migration—people moving out of the state—and as you noted, the new revenue that was brought in helped fund a lot of valuable programs for lower-income and middle-income people. I view that as a net win. Obviously the jury is still out about what will happen in Washington once this is imposed, but based on the Massachusetts experience, I think it’s unlikely that you’ll see a massive outflow of people.Now I want to be transparent. If you impose a large enough tax, then it’s fair to say you’ll see more of a response to that, especially if you do it at the state level. If you don’t like your new higher taxes in Massachusetts, you can move to New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut. It’s easier to move across state lines than it is to leave the United States, when you’re talking about a federal tax. Same thing with Washington state. But the bottom line is—and this is consistent with most people’s intuition—if you live in a place, you have roots in that place, your kids go to school there, you have your business there, the idea of picking up and moving and completely overhauling your entire life because you’re paying marginally higher taxes doesn’t make a lot of sense. You see this in the data.Bacon: OK, so second issue. We’re seeing these wealth tax proposals. The big one we’re talking about is California has a ballot initiative—they haven’t gotten it on the ballot yet, but they’re trying to get it qualified—where it’ll be a 5 percent one-time tax on income over a billion dollars. Senator Warren has reintroduced her wealth tax, similar to the one you worked on in the campaign. Bernie Sanders has a wealth tax he’s talking about now. I think the usual critiques of these are: one, that they’re unworkable, too complicated to value the richest people’s wealth in trusts. The second is that these have not worked in European countries. So talk about those two objections.Bharat Ramamurti: I think they’re relatively easy to address. Number one, the vast majority of wealth that people have is in the form of easily valued goods. A lot of it is in publicly traded stock. There’s a market price for that. A lot of what’s not in the form of stock is in the form of property, where again, the state already values your property—your residences—on an annual basis. People like to talk about these edge cases: What about you buy a Picasso—how do you value that? You have a classic car collection, how do you value that? First of all, that stuff tends to be a very small portion of the overall wealth. Second of all, at both the state and federal level, there’s already a process, because we have an estate tax. When somebody dies, you have to value their estate. There are already people at the state and federal level whose job it is to value these types of assets. And so when we’re talking about a wealth tax that applies to a very small sliver of people—you’re literally talking about hundreds of people in California, you’re talking about thousands of people if you’re talking about billionaires in the United States—it’s really not that onerous to have the resources and the capacity at the government to value all of their assets on an annual basis.In terms of Europe, there are some really important distinctions between wealth taxes in Europe and wealth taxes in the United States as they’ve been proposed. Number one, in Europe taxes are applied based on residency. So if you are a resident of France and they impose a new wealth tax, all you have to do to avoid the wealth tax is move to Belgium or Switzerland or Luxembourg. And we talked about this before—at the state level with some of these state taxes, people aren’t really responding by moving. But if you’re talking about a wealth tax that could potentially take a relatively big bite out of your net worth, maybe it’s worth it to move across the lines. But in the United States, taxes are imposed based on citizenship. We know that because there are U.S. citizens who live in Singapore or wherever who are paying U.S. taxes because they’re U.S. citizens. The only way to avoid a wealth tax imposed at the federal level by the United States government would be to renounce your U.S. citizenship. And so the Warren proposal and the Sanders proposal have what are called exit taxes. So if you do want to renounce your U.S. citizenship, you say: OK, the cost of that is a one-time very large wealth tax to renounce your citizenship. So you capture the revenue that you would’ve been collecting on an annual basis. It’s much easier to do because it’s based on citizenship.The other thing is that the European wealth taxes had a lot of exceptions to them. So in France, for example, they said your residences don’t count towards your net worth, or your retirement fund doesn’t count towards your net worth. And so what happens when you create exceptions? Rich people are going to move all of their money around into the excepted categories. They say: We’re going to buy a lot of properties now, or we’re going to shift all of our money into these retirement funds to protect it. And as a result, the tax base started to shrink because the money migrated into these excepted assets. Both the Warren and Sanders proposals and the California proposal don’t have these exceptions, so you don’t have this easy way of evading the wealth tax.I’ve been arguing about this for years now. As you said, I worked on the original Warren wealth tax back in 2019, 2018. By not having these exceptions, by taxing based on citizenship, and by pairing it with an exit tax, you really do avoid a lot of the normal critiques about why wealth taxes are ineffective.Bacon: I think the founders of Google and a few other very wealthy people have left California. Does the California wealth tax have a particular problem where people are going to try to escape in a way that other things we’ve talked about have not?Ramamurti: Doing it at the state level presents additional complications, and I’ve tried to be clear about that, because it’s different than the federal level—they apply it based on residency in California. The way they tried to solve it in California is that they did it retroactively. So this proposal hasn’t even gone on the ballot yet. But if it’s on the ballot this November and it’s approved, it would apply the one-time wealth tax to anybody living in California as of the end of last year. So some of these people who are moving—it’s not clear to me whether they moved before the deadline. In other words, if you moved in January, it doesn’t matter, you’re still going to be captured by this wealth tax. Doing it retroactively—and there are probably some other ways that you can design the wealth tax so that at the state level you’re addressing this concern about people moving—but I think from my perspective, optimally, you would do something at the federal level and avoid all of these concerns about moving across state lines.Bacon: Now we’re going to talk about federal taxes. Senator Booker has a proposal that would basically create a 41 or 43 percent tax bracket. Senator Van Hollen wants to raise taxes by 12 percent on income over $5 million. So those are more traditional Democratic tax ideas. You think those are fine and normal? I think the critique of them is they might discourage investment—I think that’s a less strong [critique]. Talk about those proposals.Ramamurti: You’ve got a host of these ideas at the federal level to raise more taxes from the wealthy. It’s an important contextual point to just note that between the George W. Bush tax cut in the 2000s, Trump one tax cuts in 2017, and then the most recent tax cuts that they passed last year, the wealthy have gotten a huge number of tax breaks in the last 25 years. Even just resetting things to where they were in 2000, before this bevy of Republican tax cuts, would bring in an enormous amount of revenue, and I think it’s really important that Democrats at least do that.As you noted, the Van Hollen proposal has a specific idea of imposing what’s called a surtax—an additional tax amount on income over $1 million, and then an additional surtax on income over $5 million. What’s important about that proposal is that it’s not just wage income. Relatively few people bring in more than a million dollars a year in just W-2 wages. If you limited it to just that, it’s basically like you’re taxing LeBron James and Beyoncé—artists and entertainers and athletes. But they have a more expansive definition of income where it includes capital gains, which is really important because for the very, very wealthy—especially the top 0.1 percent, the top 0.01 percent—almost all of their income comes in the form of capital income: from their privately held businesses, from their stock portfolio. You’ve got to figure out ways of taxing that.So the Van Hollen proposal does that. It says any income you get—whether it’s from capital gains, whether it’s from wages, whether it’s from rental properties, whatever—if it’s over a million dollars, you’re going to pay a surtax on that. I think that’s a perfectly fine and defensible approach. The Booker proposal is a little bit vaguer on what they want to do for high-income taxes, but in general, we as a country, and we Democrats as a party, have to figure out a way of bringing in much more revenue from the very wealthy, because as of today, the effective tax rate that the very, very wealthy pay on their income is not really that much higher than the effective tax rate that somebody making $60,000 a year pays. When you account for payroll taxes, when you account for state and local taxes, the overall effective tax rate is not that high—and that’s almost all because the way we tax capital income in this country is really unfair, right? We are not taxing capital income in the same way that we tax wage income.Bacon: When you and I talked when you were working for President Biden, you were aware of politics and elections and how those things matter. So the first question would be: In 2019, a wealth tax was somewhat unusual. It was a new proposal. And secondly, billionaires—I actually looked at the data on this—billionaires were not reviled, and the billionaire class has made themselves much more opposed than they were before. So are these ideas—even before, to be clear, the wealth tax was popular in 2019 and taxes overall are popular—but are we at a moment now where these are even more politically useful for Democrats than five or six years ago?Ramamurti: Yeah, when we—meaning Senator Warren—introduced the wealth tax in 2019 as part of our presidential campaign, it was polling at 70, 75 percent, even 80 percent back then. And as you noted, a couple of things have happened. Number one, the concentration of wealth in this country has gotten much more significant, and the easiest way to look at that is: When we introduced that wealth tax in 2019, it was projected to bring in $3 trillion over the next 10 years, which is a lot of money. Senator Warren reintroduced the exact same idea—exact same structure, same rates, everything—a couple of weeks ago. It’s now projected to bring in more than $6 trillion.Bacon: Does that mean they doubled their money? Is that a way to think about it?Ramamurti: They doubled the amount of revenue [it would] bring in, even though the tax base and the tax rate are the same. So what has changed is that the accumulation of wealth at that very high level has doubled, effectively.That’s a sign that we have a growing issue. I always like to say: Why should we have a wealth tax? It’s like when they asked a famous bank robber why he robbed banks, and he would say, That’s where the money is. That’s where the money is right now, and it’s a way of bringing in a significant amount of tax revenue without really affecting the lifestyles of any of these people. The second thing is, as you said, there has been this growing alignment between the very ultra-wealthy and the Republican Party. I don’t think it’s about punishing your political enemies, but as a whole, this class of people has gotten much more overtly political. And if you look at what Senator Sanders has said about his wealth tax, it’s about curbing the political influence of a group of people. That’s an important consideration too.Bacon: Almost a democracy consideration, not just a financial one. So just to look forward a little bit ... I assume we’re going to have a lot of presidential candidates next year, and there’ll be a range of them. Ro Khanna is on one [end of the] range, let’s say Josh Shapiro is on the other [end] for now—I’m not promising he’s running—do you think even the more moderate candidates will have to have some kind of tax increase plan, because of where the party’s moving? What’s your sense of that?Ramamurti: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been pretty mainstream in the Democratic Party to push for very significant tax increases on the wealthy. Joe Biden was considered a moderate Democrat, right? That was his position in the 2020 primary. His budgets when he was in office had about $5 trillion in new taxes ... entirely from the very wealthy, people who are in the top 2 percent of incomes, and from corporations. That’s probably the baseline. I think even the most centrist, moderate person running in the upcoming primaries is likely to endorse something like that level of taxation.It’s important to think about two things. Number one, that level of taxation is basically getting us part of the way to reversing all the tax cuts that these folks have pocketed thanks to repeated Republican tax cuts. It sounds like an enormous amount of money—it is an enormous amount of money—but it’s really just recouping, or resetting us to where we were pre-Republican tax cuts. The second thing is: In the most recent iteration of the Republican tax cut, the Trump bill that passed in 2025, there was a massive cut to Medicaid and SNAP. Which [was] hugely harmful both economically and for people’s health for lower-income people. It’s going to be table stakes for any Democrat running for president to say: I want to reverse those cuts. Just reversing those cuts is about $2 trillion in additional spending—and that’s before you turn to any other affirmative economic agenda item you might have as president.... In a world where some Democrats are going to say any new spending has to be offset with new revenue, you’re going to need a huge amount of revenue just to cover reversing these horrible cuts to Medicaid and SNAP—let alone if you want to do paid leave or childcare or housing or any of these other priorities you might have. You’re going to need a lot of revenue.If you do have a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress come 2029, there’s going to be a big effort to raise taxes. Now the same thing, you could say, was true of the Biden administration.We did not raise taxes—far less than what the president wanted—and that was because Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema, as the marginal votes in the Senate, blocked trillions of dollars of tax increases single-handedly. The same dynamic could present itself in 2029, depending on the composition of Congress.Bacon: We should be reading Roy Cooper’s views on taxes carefully and hoping they’re good. Alright, that’s helpful to think about. Now I’m going to talk about tax cuts, because this is where the party has moved in a way I didn’t expect. Senator Van Hollen—who has done a great job on a lot of issues and is somebody I really respect—his proposal would basically give you no income tax if you make $90,000 or $92,000 or below for a family, or $46,000 or below for an individual.To be fair, we don’t have much income tax in the first place for these families, but zeroing it out is an interesting idea, and in some ways some critics might say it takes away from the idea that we’re all in the tax system together. Then Cory Booker has proposed essentially making the first $75,000 of income tax-free—no taxes on that—and so that would have a different impact in a certain sense. Talk about those ideas. Let’s start with the broad concept of these tax exemptions. A broad base, you would think, would come from Republicans—although Republicans have always focused on the higher end; they’re still focused on the middle and working classes here—but this sort of “no taxes, period,” is unusual for Democrats. How do you view that broadly?Ramamurti: It raises a philosophical question, which is: What are taxes for? This is a live debate in the Democratic Party. What I’m sympathetic to from the Van Hollen and Booker proposals is that everyone’s concerned about the cost of living. Voters are saying that affordability and cost of living is their number one priority. It’s been that way since 2021 and the inflation that started post-Covid. Democrats are looking for a way to be responsive to that concern [in a way] that people feel is tangible.Bacon: You think it’s reasonable and probably smart, right?Ramamurti: I don’t, actually, but I think that’s—Bacon: Not the plans themselves, but the idea of being responsive to affordability is useful.Ramamurti: It’s an animating force behind both of these proposals, is to say: What we as Democrats have largely proposed is these targeted proposals. We’re going to do something about childcare, we’re going to do something about the cost of higher ed, we’re going to do something about the cost of groceries, we’re going to do something about the cost of gas. The logical follow-up to that is: Well, if we really just want people to have more money in their pockets, why don’t we just cut their taxes? Which is an easy way of doing that. Because person X may say: I don’t need childcare, I’m too old, I don’t need higher education, so your proposals don’t mean anything to me—but you cut my taxes and that’s great. I think that’s what people are responding to.There’s an important distinction between the two proposals. The Van Hollen proposal is much more targeted—it’s much less expensive, about a $1.5 trillion tax cut. The Booker proposal is like a $6 trillion tax cut. It would include tax cuts for people making $700,000 or $800,000 a year. The Van Hollen one strikes me as better designed, but the philosophical idea—Bacon: The Booker one, just to be clear, exempts all income below $75,000 a year. So that means people who make a lot of money would qualify, versus the Van Hollen one, which appears not to do that the same way.Ramamurti: Exactly. So the way I think about it is that the Booker one basically raises the standard deduction to $75,000. So if you make $800,000, it’s still valuable to you to have that money exempted. Whereas the Van Hollen one is basically like a cap: if you make under this amount of money, you don’t pay taxes; if you make above it, all the normal taxes apply. But aside from those design questions, it raises this philosophical question: Is it important that we have a broad tax base in order to make people feel invested, both economically and philosophically? Can we survive at the federal level by saying that half or more of people don’t have to pay any federal income taxes?I think mathematically, the answer is yes. Income and wealth is so concentrated in the United States that you largely could finance most government activities—including expansions of programs—through much higher taxes on the rich. I’m not saying it’s necessarily economically justifiable, but it’s mathematically feasible because of the level of income and wealth inequality in the United States. Remember, this is the income tax—payroll taxes are still the main tax that a lot of low-income and middle-income people pay, and those aren’t changing. Those go toward Social Security, which is a very big program. So I think it’s important to keep that in mind.But one thing that people say is that the reason Social Security is so popular and so hard to cut is because everyone feels like they have a stake in the system. They pay their payroll taxes into the system, they get their Social Security out when they retire. Does it become harder to run a government that provides housing support, nutrition support, and so on, if most people feel like they aren’t paying into the system and feel like [they don’t] have a stake in the system? I guess I’m not really sure about that.Bacon: That’s what I was going to ask you.Ramamurti: I think that we should design a federal tax code that is most economically beneficial—meaning if it makes sense from that perspective to mostly tax the rich, we should do that.Bacon: It’s interesting. The Democratic Party is divided in a lot of ways, but these tax ideas—what I saw is my wonkish friends on the center-left, the left, the progressives, all were like: these are stupid. Then you could tell the actual politicians who have to get people’s votes were like: No, we think this is a good idea because we have to appeals to people. What I’m struggling with is: My guess is $92,000 for a family of four is not poverty level, but it’s also probably less than most of the people analyzing these proposals are talking about. We may need to think about how we define middle class in a certain way, and what’s comfortable, because I don’t know if $90,000 for a family of four in Washington, D.C.—where you live, and I used to live—I don’t think that’s comfortable.Ramamurti: Yeah, exactly. The way to think about it is that as a party we’ve been pretty comfortable arguing that we should be providing benefits to people pretty high up the income spectrum. For example, I spent a lot of time in the administration working on student debt relief, and we basically said: If you make under $125,000 as an individual, $250,000 as a household or a couple, you’re entitled to some relief. That gets at this intuition that even firmly middle-class people could use a little bit of help. I don’t have any problem with saying a firefighter married to a teacher who make $180,000 combined still could use a little bit of help. Whether that comes in the form of tax cuts or childcare benefits or an expanded Pell Grant or whatever—I don’t see why there should be a distinction between those two things. If we’re comfortable with getting benefits to that set of people, why are we uncomfortable with having tax cuts for that set of people? It seems to me like one and the same. Bacon: Tax cuts versus loan forgiveness versus subsidies for housing, subsidies for food, whatever it is—taxes are a part of that mix. If we think someone’s poor enough to get one of those benefits, they should [get a tax cut too]. That’s probably where I am too.Ramamurti: I haven’t had this kind of visceral negative reaction to these ideas in the same way that some of my former colleagues have.Bacon: The Booker idea seems badly designed and gives a bit too much to people who have too much money. That’s my concern with it—not that it’s tax cuts.Ramamurti: Yeah. The Van Hollen idea, which a lot of people have started to coalesce around—his proposal had a lot of co-sponsors in the Senate—I think it would be neutral to good to do some version of that. Now the question is, empirically, new administrations don’t have either the political or fiscal muscle to do more than a few things. I find it heartbreaking, because in the Biden administration I wanted to do housing and childcare and all these things, and if we had been able to get some of these revenue measures past Manchin and Sinema, we probably could have done a lot of them and done some transformative things. But same thing with the Obama administration—they were able to do financial regulation, they did Obamacare, and other than that it was a bunch of relatively small things. And that was with 59 or 60 Senate votes. So the question is a prioritization question rather than a good idea, bad idea question.This strikes me as a pretty defensible idea, some Van Hollen–esque idea. But should it come higher than a big investment in new affordable housing supply? Should it come ahead of doing something about childcare affordability? Should it come ahead of doing a refundable child tax credit that would functionally eliminate child poverty in the United States? Should it come ahead of doing something about the affordability of higher education? Those are the hard questions that you need to answer. Adding this into the mix means that you just have another thing competing for these resources and the political capacity. Some of the concern that people have is that it’s easy to do a tax cut—it’s much easier to just say we’re cutting people’s taxes by X rather than saying, Here’s a brand new childcare program that involves all of these moving parts, state cooperation, blah blah blah. Let’s just do the tax cut. But if you were given a ticket for $1.5 trillion in new spending and could use it on one thing—what is the thing that you would want to use it on, if you are focused on doing the best thing for the country, helping the people who need it the most, and also maximizing your political benefit? Thinking about all three of those things together, is the middle-class tax cut actually the best use? That to me is more of an open question.Bacon: My understanding is a lot of the members feel like Trump’s no-taxes-on-tips was a big electoral factor. I do election coverage and I don’t perceive that to be one of the top five things that shifted the 2024 election. But you’re in this world too—do you perceive that as something that really made a huge difference? I’m open to it. I’m just not sure.Ramamurti: I think it made a pretty big difference. I guess this is what I would say—it made a really big difference in Nevada ... where you have a lot of tipped workers.I’ve written about this. Democrats think a lot about unions, with good reason. But they think a lot about the industries that create goods. About 80 percent of people in the United States work in the service sector, and I feel like our agenda for service sector workers is pretty unclear. We want to raise the minimum wage—that helps some subsection of them.But what’s our message to retail workers and people who work in fast food and people who work at the childcare center? No tax on tips—again, it doesn’t cover all these people, but it was a thing that was memorable. For anybody who made income via tips, it was like: I will benefit from this thing. I feel like Democrats didn’t have a comparable idea that was really about the service sector. I think that this is an attempt to rectify that and to say: No matter how you bring in your income, whether you work on the factory floor or you’re a blackjack dealer or you work at the Gap, this is a benefit for you. You’re going to get a tax cut.The caution I would have for Democrats is that Republicans have been running on middle-class tax cuts for a long time, and it really hasn’t shown an enormous political upside, in the sense that I think no-tax-on-tips was a memorable proposal in part because Democrats didn’t have a counterproposal that they were pushing for. In 2017 the Trump tax cut included some middle-class tax cuts—it was one of the most unpopular laws ever, and dozens of Republicans who voted for it lost their elections in the next midterm cycle. There were some middle-class tax cuts in this Trump bill in 2025, and everyone’s actively running away from it because it’s so brutally unpopular. So the idea that this is some kind of political silver bullet is unjustified.We probably don’t have time to get into it here, but for me, people’s concerns about the economy are not really like, My taxes are a little bit too high. It’s more about the structure of the economy and feeling like, My ability to control my own destiny has eroded over the last 30 or 40 years. What I really want is a feeling of more control, more empowerment—in my workplace, in my life—to live where I want and have the kind of lifestyle that I want. A $1,000 tax cut, while meaningful, is not going to solve that.Bacon: I think that’s right, because a lot of this affordability discourse has ended up being too vague. But you said it well: Can I afford the things I want? is what people are really talking about. Let’s close with state-based taxes. Katie Porter is running for governor of California. She would exempt people from income taxes on their first $100,000 of income. Keisha Bottoms is running for governor in Georgia, and her proposal is no weekend taxes for teachers. You’re seeing a couple of different things—particularly around jobs Democrats want to signal they like. I assume we’ll have firefighters and policemen soon, but teachers now. Excepting taxes, in Katie Porter’s case. How do you feel about those? These are very different ideas, but what do you think of the trend of state tax cuts?Ramamurti: I have two problems with it. Number one: At the state level, there are balanced budget requirements. Every time you say, I don’t want to bring in revenue from X, the immediate question should be: OK, what are you giving up for that? Some people say we’re going to balance it with higher taxes on the rich—OK. But if you’re talking about having to cut school funding or nutrition funding in order to offset the effect of this tax cut, you’re going to raise very hard questions about whether it’s worth it. Or even whether the people that your supposedly benefitting are coming out ahead because of the loss of services on the other side of it.The other thing is: When you start exempting certain categories of people from taxes, we talked about the philosophical question before—I do think that starts to reinforce the idea that taxes are some punitive thing, and that when we exempt our favorite groups from certain forms of taxes, we’re saying we’re letting them escape this horrible punishment. The line between when it’s OK and when it’s not OK is hard to define.But it opens the door to more of a Republican framing when you start to say, I love teachers and I don’t think they should have to pay taxes no matter what their income is. It starts to reinforce this idea that taxes, rather than being a thing that we all have to pay in order to support the kind of society that we want, are a punitive tool from the government, and we exempt our favorite groups from while forcing everybody else to pay them. It does reinforce this negative idea.But anyway, the main concern I would have is the first one, which is that at the state level the trade-offs are more severe, because unlike the federal government—where we can go out and borrow at still pretty reasonable rates if we need to—at the state level that becomes much harder. You are often talking about a trade-off between the provision of some services and these tax cuts.Bacon: To close with—what do we learn from the Biden years? Is this purely inflation bad, don’t have inflation, or is there anything more? Because the job growth, unemployment decreases ... the lowest unemployment for Black people of all time—to me, there were a lot of good things. Inflation [aside], people who had student loans got them forgiven. So is the lesson inflation, or is there anything deeper that you think about? If you go back to government, what would you do differently?Ramamurti: A lot of it was inflation. If you look at the data on how every incumbent party—whether left-leaning or right-leaning—across the world fared in 2024, all of them saw a decline in their standing. In fact, Democrats in the United States over-performed dramatically compared to the average incumbent party globally. The main lesson to me is: Don’t be the incumbent party during a global inflation crisis. I don’t know how replicable that lesson is. But I don’t want to diminish and I don’t want to seem like I’m passing the buck, because I do think there were a lot of things that we could have done better. I’ve talked about them.Given the fact that we were facing this inflation issue, part of me wonders whether we should have taken time in 2022, when we were trying to do Build Back Better—if you remember that effort, which was this kind of omnibus effort to do childcare and housing and all these things, which would’ve helped people on affordability—whether we could have done something that was even more targeted at the cost of living at that point, where we had congressional majorities. Especially short-term focus. A lot of the things we were working on would’ve been a longer-term focus.The other thing I don’t want to diminish is that we have a really inadequate social safety net in the United States, and we built one temporarily during Covid—both with the CARES Act, which passed under Trump, and the American Rescue Plan under Biden. We had all of these supports in place: a pause on student loan payments, a foreclosure and eviction moratorium, the checks, an expanded child tax credit, expanded Medicaid, and probably a dozen other things that I’m not talking about now that basically created, for once, a robust social safety net in the United States. Despite the fact that we were going through a global pandemic, if you look at survey data about how people felt about the economy during that time, they actually felt pretty good, because they weren’t feeling so precarious. All of that withered away over the course of 2022 and 2023.Bacon: It was emergency spending, so it made sense for it to wind down when the emergency ended—but it took money out of people’s pockets, in practicality.Ramamurti: Yeah. We restarted student loan payments. The public health emergency ended, so a lot of people lost Medicaid. Obviously the foreclosure and eviction moratorium ended. The child tax credit expired, even though we tried to extend it. So the net effect of all of that was a real withdrawal of the social safety net for a lot of low-income and middle-income people. So is it that surprising that people responded to that by saying: Whatever good things Biden has done, my material circumstances got worse—I was getting these checks and all these other sources of income and support, and now they’re gone?Unemployment insurance, in retrospect, was a much more challenging political moment than a lot of people appreciated. You had the surge of inflation on the one hand, and then the expiration of all of these pandemic-era social safety net programs on the other hand, and navigating the intersection of those two was really hard—figuring out how we should make sure that the average family was coming out ahead.For us in the Biden administration, we said: If they are getting good-paying jobs and their wages are going up, that should be enough. And the data showed that we got people back to work, unemployment was really low, wages were going up—especially at the low end of the income spectrum. But the truth is a lot of people aren’t in the labor market, so they weren’t benefiting from all that improvement in wages, and adding a bunch of costs to their balance sheet was frustrating.The analogy I like to give is: If you got an additional $10,000 in income one year because of higher wages, but then you’re spending $9,500 of that just paying for the same stuff you were paying for before—you’re “ahead,” but who’s going to be happy about that? You’re just like: All this money I made is going to pay for the same stuff. That’s frustrating. I think that manifested itself in a lot of frustration with how the economy was working, understandably. Democrats paid the price for that, in addition to a lot of other stuff that we don’t need to get into here.But there was real concern and frustration about the economy that made a lot of sense, and that I wish we had been better able to address. Some of it we tried to address, but Congress wouldn’t go along with it. Some of it we came to a little bit too late in the game. But I hope that we learned from that and are more proactive about it next time.Bacon: Bharat, tell people where they can find you—you’re doing some excellent work. Tell people where they can find your writing ... the content you’re doing.Ramamurti: Thanks. I have a Substack. It’s called The Bully Pulpit. If folks want, they can subscribe. I tend to write about less news of the day and more big-picture thinking about progressive ideas, both at the federal and state level, and how we can try to accomplish that, along with some political analysis. I’ve been doing a lot of writing about AI recently, so if any of that’s of interest, check it out.Bacon: You’re doing a really great job combining—you’re a policy expert, you’re really thinking through how we get these things done. I assume that’s an important part of what we’re thinking about here?Ramamurti: Yes. I have become extremely pragmatic over the years, because these policymaking moments are so rare and our problems are so big, that we need to take maximum advantage of them whenever we get them. A lot of my focus is: When that time comes—hopefully 2028, 2029—where we get complete control of Washington, how do we take maximum advantage?Bacon: Good to see you. Thanks for joining me.Ramamurti: Thanks for having me.

If you only got your news from the Democratic Party’s corporate wing, you’d be excused for thinking that not much of consequence was happening in the world. Centrist groups like Third Way and pro-Netanyahu organizations like the Anti-Defamation League don’t seem to be fretting about the escalating war in the Middle East, the Trump regime’s insider trading, or Republicans’ plans for another reconciliation package that would drastically cut health care spending to fund the war (while also suppressing the vote). In their circles, there’s a different catastrophe that the Democratic Party should be prioritizing right now: left-wing influencer Hasan Piker’s efforts to rally in support of progressive Democratic candidates. I’m pretty new to following Piker, who will join Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed at two universities next week. I think he first came onto my radar when he interviewed Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before one of their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies last year. I knew he was a popular Twitch streamer with a significant following among young men—essentially the exact “liberal Joe Rogan” figure that Democrats identified in the aftermath of the 2024 election as one of their greatest needs—as well as an unabashed anti-Zionist critic of Israel.I also know that groups like Third Way have been the loudest voices urging Democrats to abandon “purity tests” like protecting immigrants and the transgender community. So when Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, and press adviser Lily Cohen wrote in The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago that Piker is a “Jew-hater,” against whom “the Democratic Party needs to draw a line in the sand,” I assumed that there must be something pretty serious behind their claims that Piker has helped spread “the surge of antisemitism.” And that worried me, as someone who has written about my own concerns regarding the growth of antisemitism in this country—so I reached out to Piker myself. “Here’s the structural problem with what I do as a livestreamer,” he told me on Monday. “I’m talking for 10 hours a day on very volatile issues, oftentimes from a perspective that most Americans are not privy to, an anti-imperialist framework. These are issues that people closely identify with, so tensions are high. And then on top of that, I have a policy of letting whoever wants to speak in this 30,000-person, Madison Square Garden–size arena.” (That’s the size of his average livestream audience.) “So people come in and piss me off,” Piker said. “They say shit when I’m delivering an impassioned speech or looking at some heinous war crimes. And there are moments where I just pop off and they’ll clip that. And then they’ll try to disseminate that to the end of the world and completely rob it of its context. If you were talking for 10 hours a day, you’re going to say stuff that could very easily be misconstrued.” Piker has done almost 20,000 hours of entirely unscripted, off-the-cuff streaming. I spent some time watching a tiny fraction of that footage. What I found left me disturbed—but not about Piker. Rather, I was floored by the hypocrisy and bad faith of those attacking him.Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, condemned Piker last week amid the news of his upcoming appearance with El-Sayed, writing that “Piker has a long track record of commending and excusing terrorism. He routinely uses his platform to spread anti-Jewish tropes, amplify propaganda from designated terrorist groups, and promote toxic anti-Zionism.” Greenblatt didn’t cite specifics, but Third Way’s Cowan and Cohen, in their Journal op-ed, identified four comments as evidence of Piker’s antisemitism: “He has referred to ultra-Orthodox Jews as ‘inbred,’ employed antisemitic dog whistles (‘bloodthirsty, violent pig-dog’) against an anti-Hamas viewer of his stream, compared liberal Zionists to ‘liberal Nazis,’ and said ‘Hamas is a thousand times better’ than the Israeli state.” Piker has also been attacked for having said, “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”I dislike much of this quoted language, but the context is undeniably important. I asked Piker to respond to each example. “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.” “I think it’s very clear what I was saying,” Piker told me. “I was debating someone at the time about there being sexual violence that occurred on October 7th. And I said sexual violence does take place in situations like this, and there was definitely testimony of sexual violence that had taken place amongst the hostages. But that doesn’t change the dynamic of Israel committing a genocide against the Palestinians, and my opposing that genocide.” The original footage of this moment bears this out; the claim that Piker was condoning sexual violence—rather than saying it does not justify Israel’s actions—is simply bad faith. “Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel.Putting aside the hyperbole of “a thousand times,” Piker says he stands by the basic sentiment of this comment. “I think it’s unquestionable at this point that, yeah, Hamas didn’t do a genocide. Israel did. And I think that’s very hard to argue against, beyond saying, how crazy, how ridiculous, Hamas is a terrorist organization, you’re a terrorist.” Personally, I think there are limits to a quantitative comparison of Hamas and Israel, both of which have done horrendous things—but it’s not antisemitic of Piker to make the observation that Israel has killed more innocent people and caused more suffering and destruction than Hamas.Comparing “liberal Zionists” to “liberal Nazis”Here’s the full quote: “When people say, like, ‘Oh, well, I’m a liberal Zionist, I want there to be a Jewish ethno-state,’ I’m like, ‘OK, what do you mean?’ It’s like saying you’re like a liberal Nazi. Like, you want an Aryan majority ethno-state?” Piker was clearly making a point about the problematic nature of all ethno-nationalisms. “These are the exact same forces that I combat here in the United States of America as an American citizen,” he explained to me. “The growth of fascism that’s taking place in this country. In some ways I see Israel as, like, our future, as where we are headed here in the United States. And in many ways, we’re already there, right? So it’s not a special status for Zionism, is what I mean. It’s just like any other reactionary ideology that I actively combat.” Much of the argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitic boils down to a sense that Jewish ethno-nationalism is treated differently than other ethno-nationalisms. But it’s clear that Piker has long demonstrated a universal opposition to ethno-nationalisms of any kind. You can argue that his comparison between Zionism and Nazism is insensitive, but it’s not antisemitic—particularly when you consider that prominent Zionists like Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse recently made a similar comparison, albeit framed (horrifyingly enough) as a positive. “Bloodthirsty, violent pig-dog”“I’ve never heard that be referred to Jewish people,” Piker told me, referring to “pig-dog.” “Someone showed me there has been one instance where a Nazi called Jewish people that, but I didn’t know that.” To be clear, I have never before heard anyone claim that “pig-dog” was an antisemitic dog whistle. The only other use of “pig-dog” I’ve been able to find was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which a taunting Frenchman tells King Arthur, “You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person!” I suppose one could argue that “bloodthirsty” and “violent” are dog whistles referencing the antisemitic “blood libel” trope, but this comment occurred in the context of an exchange about bloody acts of violence—that certainly seems like a more reasonable explanation to me. Referring to ultra-Orthodox Jews as “inbred” I told Piker that I thought calling ultra-Orthodox Jews “inbred” was dehumanizing and indefensible. He essentially agreed with me, though he provided some important context. “As far as the utilization of the term ‘inbred,’ there’s a 10-minute compilation of me calling white nationalists, white supremacists, racists, neo-Nazis all inbred, because at the end of the day, I just use it as a substitute instead of other pejoratives.” (I checked, and it’s true that Piker does frequently use the term “inbred” as an insult for all sorts of groups.) Having said this, Piker also expressed regret about this comment, saying, “But yeah, I agree, that’s the one quote that’s like, someone could hear that and sincerely be like, ‘Oh, this guy’s actually antisemitic.’ It’s one that I will be more careful not to utilize in the future. Yeah, of course I regret that.”So, to review: Over the course of nearly 20,000 hours of streaming, Piker’s attackers have found one offensive comment about ultra-Orthodox Jews and several other comments that essentially boil down to strident anti-Zionism. And the immediate context of those comments is only part of the picture. Here’s the fact that Piker’s critics never mention: For years, he has consistently warned of the dangers of antisemitism and spoken up for Jewish people, in a world of online streaming where doing so can be unpopular.In his broadcasts and elsewhere, Piker has called antisemitism “a canary in the coal mine of fascism” and “a problem in Western society in perpetuity.” He has said, “There’s nothing grosser than both being antisemitic and then using the cause of Palestine to feed people more antisemitic commentary.” He has shut down the antisemitic trope of a global Jewish cabal—“Zionists don’t run the world.… That just sounds like you’re antisemitic but trying to hide it. No, capitalists run the world.” He has praised Judaism, saying, “The history of the Jewish people is one of withstanding pogroms and resisting genocide” and noting that Jews have “been at the front of any matter of injustice globally, whether it be the Civil Rights Movement in America, whether it be apartheid in South Africa.” And he regularly calls out his followers—risking backlash from paid supporters—when they engage in antisemitism during his streams. This is the person that figures like ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt—who, it’s worth remembering, defended Elon Musk after the Tesla CEO threw up a Sieg heil! to an arena full of Trump supporters—are telling us is a major threat to Jews today. You can come to your own conclusions about such claims. Given this demonstrated commitment to pushing back against antisemitism, I asked Piker whether he thinks it’s possible to arrest its growth. He was surprisingly optimistic.“There’s a lot of people that have told me that I’ve played a formative role in them snapping out of the white supremacist pipeline, the right-wing rabbit holes,” he told me. “I’ve seen people go from being Groypers to slowly but surely recognizing that a lot of this stuff is distractions from class war. A lot of this stuff is distractions from the real economic pain that they’re feeling on a daily basis. And I’m able to, like, rip them away from that. I think for young men, they’re very malleable. They can change their minds. I don’t think the average American fascist is a card-carrying ideologically minded fascist. There’s an opportunity to just shake these guys and bring some sense back into their worldview.” Between Piker and his critics, it seems pretty clear who’s in a better position to do that shaking.

Kit Klarenberg Substack As the criminal Zionist-American war on Iran enters its second month, the conflict has proven so ruinous for the aggressors that dire alarm is being widely sounded. Embarrassing failure to subdue the Islamic Republic from the air has raised the prospect of a US ground operation of some kind, widely perceived as a suicide […]

More than half of US college students say they’re using the technology in their coursework at least once a week.

“This anniversary is a reminder to the American people who's responsible for making their lives harder,” said Suzan DelBene, D-Wash.