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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 29 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump just unleashed a barrage of unhinged threats toward Iran in a new interview with Fox News. He threatened to bomb all Iran’s bridges and power plants, and said explicitly that the entire population of Iran might soon be without electric power.There’s a temptation to dismiss moments like these as bluster. But we can’t let ourselves lose sight of what exactly he’s threatening to do, just how sociopathic these threats really are, and just how terrible it is that the media is now largely numb to them. This all comes as some MAGA figures are warning against escalation in some surprising new ways as well.So we’re trying to make sense of it all with former State Department official Emily Horne. Emily, always good to have you on.Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg, for having me.Sargent: OK, so we’re in this weird holding pattern where Trump has held off on escalating and he just keeps making all these threats, and he keeps saying Iran is desperate to talk to him. Yet at the same time, the reporting indicates that in reality the Iranians are not in any rush to talk to Trump at all. Emily, can you sum up the situation as of now?Horne: The TLDR on that, to use bureaucratic terms, is that Iran has all of the leverage and all of the momentum at this moment in the conflict. I think they’ve shown that there’s a real willingness on their end to pass the cost of this war to the Iranian people, which, as terrible as that is, is a major asset for them. They are not particularly troubled by their own people’s suffering. And that, plus their control of the Strait of Hormuz, gives them a lot of incentives to maintain the status quo, and a lot of leverage over the status of negotiations.They also continue to have a nuclear program, because Trump walked away from the JCPOA in his first term. So no matter what Trump has said at various points in Trump II about obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, again, that is something that Iran has as a bargaining chip, and they have been very clear that they’re going to control the direction of the conversation moving forward.Sargent: Why is it that they don’t seem to fear Trump escalating, exactly?Horne: I think part of it is that, again, they have the leverage here. As you and I have talked about before, this is an existential conflict for the IRGC. Many of them have lost family members, have already suffered greatly; they have already inflicted a great deal of suffering on the Iranian people. And so there’s a tremendous sunk cost that has already been absorbed by the IRGC in this conflict. And from their perspective, maintenance of the status quo is fine by them—as much as that continues to put Trump in an impossible position, because again, he just doesn’t have a lot of leverage at this point.But also, their strategy has been working for them. They don’t just control the strait, they are able to inflict a great deal of pain on the broader Middle East region, including by attacking tech infrastructure like data centers, attacking desalinization plants in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, attacking civilian infrastructure across the Middle East. And that again sends a signal that it is Iran’s momentum at this point in the conflict, not the U.S.’s.Sargent: Well, in that context, let’s check out something Trump just said on Fox News. He starts by saying, I could knock out all the power plants, then it keeps going from there. Listen to this.Donald Trump (voiceover): I could knock out the power plants within one day. All of their power plants would be gone. And I let ‘em know that, you know, with negotiations. They say, look—people want me to do that. I think about 91 million people without power, without bridges, with that to live. And it’s a very, very delicate balance. So I think we have a very strong position right now. They know I’m going to do that if they don’t make a deal. The bridges are going to be gone. Literally, in less than a—I would say in two hours, most of the bridges, the major bridges, will all be gone. And the power plants in one day.Sargent: Emily, I could be wrong, but I think this might be the first time that Trump has explicitly said not only that he’d knock out all the power plants, but also clarified that he really means knocking out electricity for all of Iran’s 91 million people. He said that. And that would be like a humanitarian catastrophe of unthinkable proportions. What would actually happen if he did that?Horne: So if Trump were to follow through on his threats to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure like power plants en masse, then you would likely see an immediate and mass humanitarian crisis that would affect at minimum tens of millions of people. Remember, Iran has a population of almost 91 million people, many of whom are outside of the center capital of Tehran. And so the power grid in Iran is already deeply stressed. Power plants and desalinization plants—which are so critical to Iran’s ability to function, with their limited access to freshwater—those are already deeply stressed as a result of this war.You would likely see a collapse of Iran’s already stressed health system because of those effects, when you have tens of millions of people who are dangerously dehydrated, don’t have clean water to drink; diseases and waterborne illnesses will be spiking as sanitation is failing. You would likely see supply chain disruption from all sorts of civilian infrastructure destruction, including things like damaged roads, which would probably cause a spike in food prices. There are already millions of people internally displaced within Iran. The latest estimate that I could find is from April, and that estimates 3.2 million people.The humanitarian crisis already is so dangerous that tens of thousands of Afghan refugees—who fled Afghanistan to find safety from the Taliban and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan by going to Iran—are now returning to Afghanistan. That’s how bad the current humanitarian crisis is. And so you can only imagine how much worse it would quickly become were Trump to undertake these strikes that he is threatening.Sargent: I just want to make one other point about this. I think in the West, in advanced democracies like ours, we think to ourselves, OK, knock out a power plant, it could just get back up and running pretty quickly. But that really isn’t the case here. It would sort of depend on what exactly Trump did. But if he really decided to make good on his threat—and again, he said this on the air on national television—if he really decided to knock out power for 91 million people and really demolish a whole lot of power plants, it would take probably months, if they were lucky, to get them back up and running. So we’re talking about a humanitarian crisis that would extend for months and months and months, right?Horne: Absolutely. Probably years, probably generations, in fact—especially if you’re widening the aperture to talk about things like the effects of having tens of millions of people turned into refugees in their own country. I mean, that’s tens of millions of lives that are permanently disrupted. And the ripple effects of that are absolutely staggering to comprehend.But I also want to make another point here, that what he is proposing is a war crime under both international humanitarian and human rights law, and importantly under U.S. law.Sargent: It really would be. And I think another point to get out about this is that Trump is talking about knocking out power for all these 91 million people as if to kind of say, I’d be reluctant to take such a step. The tone is as if he’s being humane by saying that. But I really want to underscore this aspect of it. In saying this, he actually stated straight out that knocking out power for 91 million people is something he’s giving serious consideration to. Listen to that clip. At the end, he says, I will do this if Iran doesn’t do my bidding.Now, I think a lot of reporters hear this and say, he won’t do it, that’s a lot of bluster. But I don’t think that’s the right way to react. We should be saying, it’s unfathomably sociopathic that he’s even considering it, and an American president shouldn’t be talking this way. What do you think?Horne: Well, as with so many things with the second Trump administration, multiple things are true simultaneously. So again, I cannot be clear enough about this: what Donald Trump is talking about here would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. Intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure like power plants—universally, human rights attorneys and organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International agree that threatening electricity, water, health care, other civilian infrastructure is a war crime. So that’s point one.Point two, I think, yes—maybe someone on his staff got to him and made him realize that what you’re talking about is something that would be enormously disruptive to a country of 91 million souls, in addition to being outright illegal, and that that would have devastating humanitarian consequences that the United States, under your leadership, would be responsible for.But then there’s also a third part here that I think is important to call out, which is, you know, Trump has threatened many times during this conflict—as recently as a week ago—to bomb civilian infrastructure like bridges and power plants and desalinization plants. And there have been strikes that have hit, reportedly, some Iranian civilian infrastructure, that have caused some disruptions to things like water supplies to Iranian villages, but nothing at the scale of what he’s talking about. He hasn’t really done it. And the more that he talks about it but doesn’t do it, the more he sends a signal to the Iranians, but also to the global community, that he is all bluster—that there is no strategy here other than going on Fox and Friends and bragging about how big his bombs are. Which, I’m sorry, that’s not actually a strategy. And it’s certainly not going to be effective against the IRGC when, as we talked about before, they have most of the leverage in our current state of play.Sargent: Even this is alarming as well, because the logic of it doesn’t lead to a good place. Donald Trump doesn’t want to end this whole thing in humiliation—that’s the big thing we know about this. It’s been reported that he’s urged his own advisors to find some way, any way at all, for him to be able to say that he got more out of Iran than Obama got during the nuclear negotiations of 2015. And the idea that that’s what’s motivating him is just completely unthinkably loony. But putting that aside, Trump does not want this to end with him looking bad. He wants to walk out either looking incredibly strong and powerful, or with a world historical victory, or with some combination of that.And so if he keeps opening the door to these really heinous war crimes, I fear that if Iran keeps kind of poking him and stringing him along, there may come a point at which he’s willing to do it. Is that unreasonable?Horne: That’s the question. And I don’t know that anyone knows the answer to it, to be honest. Look, I think a week ago, this is what he was threatening to do. And the conditions were, as he wrote on social media on July 22—which, incidentally, was the day of the dignified transfer of four Americans who had been killed in the conflict, at Dover—he wrote on Truth Social that any time Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. will bomb and destroy one bridge or power plant in Iran. And now, a week later, he’s going on Fox and Friends and saying that instead it is, we will bomb civilian infrastructure in Iran if there’s not a deal. And he’s not specifying what he wants in that deal. But if you listen to the full clip, he immediately starts talking about how Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.Now, I’m always very reluctant to zoom in on any one particular Trump talking point and say, that’s it, that’s the new strategy—because frankly, most of the time, I don’t think he knows what the hell he’s even talking about. But it is kind of a tell to me that a week ago he was talking about Iranian missile or drone attacks on ships in Hormuz, and now he’s talking about Iran’s nuclear program and not talking about the Strait of Hormuz. And that says to me, maybe his attention has moved on, maybe he’s gotten bored, maybe there’s a part of him that realizes that he can’t do anything meaningfully to change Iran’s dominance of the strait without incurring very serious U.S. military costs—that this war is incredibly unpopular, and it’s a real albatross around his neck as Republicans approach midterms. And he’s got to figure out a way to tie a bow on this that makes it look like there’s something he can claim as victory, to your point.Sargent: Yes, and that’s not going to be easy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump Tuesday. Many MAGA figures are upset about this, fearing that a meeting will push Trump into escalating, and they don’t want Trump to do Israel’s bidding. Steve Bannon told Politico, “All of Trump’s most ardent non-Israel First supporters are furious.” Bannon called it a disaster for America First. Curt Mills of The American Conservative called it “DEFCON 1” and warned that Bibi will “argue for the essential logic of escalation.” And meanwhile, new polling shows a large chunk of MAGA turning on the war. What do you make of all that, Emily?Horne: Well, one, I think it’s really important to note that a big chunk of that strain of MAGA that you just identified is coming at this from a really virulent and ugly antisemitic place. And we need to be really precise about separating out what is legitimate criticism of the Israeli government—and in particular Netanyahu’s approach to this conflict—versus something that does veer into a really, really ugly place that none of us should want to go. So I want to draw that distinction there.But that aside, I think it’s really telling that there is not agreement within MAGA, within the Republican Party, on the best way out of this own goal that is Trump’s Iran war, his forever war, really. And even Trump alluded to this himself in his Fox interview this morning, where he talked about how there are elements of the Republican Party that want this to be over and done with, as midterms are approaching and everyone’s aware of how wildly unpopular this war is—how, as members of Congress are going back to their districts for August recess, they’re going to be getting an earful about gas prices and forever wars and politicians who are focused on the wrong thing. And that there’s a continual hawkish wing that wants this war to just keep on going until, question mark, because again, there’s no strategy here. Nobody knows what Trump’s endgame is or what the strategy is. They’re clearly just making it up as they go along. And the only answer that they have for “the bombs haven’t worked so far” is more bombs.And I’m sorry, but it’s pretty darn clear at this point that you cannot bomb your way out of this war, that Iran is not going to give up its nuclear program because of air pressure, that they’re not going to relinquish control of the Strait of Hormuz because they’re getting attacked from the air. I think the only things that are ultimately going to get to a resolution on the nuclear issue are, one, what we already had—an agreement like the JCPOA that includes international monitoring and inspection to enforce its terms—or two, a big honking ground war that commits a lot of U.S. troops in perpetuity to a Trump-Iran war that I do not think anybody, even Donald Trump, has the appetite for.So it’s really hard to see how this ends, but the best-case scenario is something like a return to the status quo that Obama had for us. You know, I was in the White House when the JCPOA was being negotiated, and we got a lot of criticism for it at the time from a lot of different voices in the Republican Party. And it’s really fascinating now to hear a lot of those same voices—maybe not in their outside voice, but in their inside voice—starting to come up with something that, boy, sounds an awful lot like the deal that we all had ten years ago.Sargent: Yeah, that is pretty funny. To your point about how we’ve got to be precise about what MAGA is actually motivated by here—it’s worth saying that MAGA certainly doesn’t care about Iranians and whether they suffer through a humanitarian catastrophe or not. They have their own set of reasons, which you alluded to, for not wanting an escalation here. I think there might be some elements of MAGA that are genuinely not for foreign entanglements and so forth, but a lot of it is really polluted with ugly sentiments, as you said. All that aside, when they hear Donald Trump talking about knocking out bridges and knocking out power plants, they too—meaning MAGA, again for their own reasons—I think probably say, shit, man, we’re really headed for an escalation here.Horne: Look, and it is Americans that are paying the price for this war. I mean, obviously the Iranian people, as we have talked about at great length, are suffering tremendously. But this war has cost American taxpayers more than a hundred billion. It’s driven up energy prices. It’s contributed to global instability that is making everything more expensive. And last week the Trump administration went to Congress asking for another $350 billion to keep it going.Meanwhile, our missile stockpiles have been massively depleted in a scarily short period of time, which leaves us incredibly vulnerable for the possible wars and conflicts of the future. And this bomb-and-hope strategy that Trump keeps on touting on Fox and Friends—it isn’t a real plan. Iran’s already survived months of American bombing campaigns. And I see no evidence that more airstrikes, or bigger airstrikes, are going to eliminate their nuclear ambitions, or force them to surrender the Strait of Hormuz, or dislodge the new regime that is in place in Tehran. The only thing that more bombs are going to do is prolong this war, further destabilize the Middle East, and continue to drive up costs for everyday Americans.Sargent: And paradoxically, I think that that dynamic actually points to the real possibility that he does end up bombing things like bridges and power plants. He may get it into his head that it’s the way the bombing was happening that essentially wasn’t forcing Iran’s hand. And it can’t possibly be that Iran can’t be bullied into this, for reasons that are intelligible if you actually put yourself in their heads, right? He can’t think that way. So he can only think, I need more force. And I just think we can’t really rule out the possibility that he makes good on some of these threats to start destroying infrastructure.Horne: Unfortunately, I suspect that you may be right about that. We can’t rule it out. And one dangerous element that we haven’t talked about in this conversation is that Trump has systematically weeded out any military advisor who is capable of telling him, Mr. President, that is not going to achieve the impact that you hope it will, or, that’s not a good idea. All of those people who are capable of speaking truth to power and speaking from their years of military experience have been forced out of our armed forces, or are essentially in hiding, because they know that to challenge the king is to end your career and possibly invite a whole host of retribution on your head. It’s an incredibly dangerous scenario where no one can tell the mad king that his decisions are not good ones.Sargent: Boy, it’s really grim when you put it like that. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack. It’s called Spin Class. Emily, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much.Horne: Thanks, Greg.

I.When I was a Federal Trade Commissioner, I learned that, as exciting as I thought my job was, most people don’t think about corporate consolidation. The word merger does not get the heart thumping. Media merger sounds like you’re stapling a document. So let me try something different: If you watch CNN, if you watch John Oliver or Bill Maher or White Lotus or House of the Dragon, if you fall asleep on your couch to hours of Friends or Guy Fieri or Anthony Bourdain or Turner Classic Movies or Rick and Morty, if you’ll admit for the purposes of this essay you’re actually snoring to 90 Day Fiancé and Naked and Afraid and Sister Wives, or even if you’re waiting around for Shark Week: Your screen time will soon come under new ownership.Or rather, it might. That wannabe owner is centimillionaire David Ellison, son of centibillionaire Larry Ellison, and he is the new CEO of Paramount Skydance. Which means that last year he bought CBS News, 60 Minutes, The Daily Show, CSI, Survivor, The Good Wife, Dexter, Star Trek, Yellowstone, Landman, BET, MTV, Showtime, the CW, South Park, and Spongebob Squarepants. He paid $8 billion for them. Now he wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion—13 times what he paid for Paramount. The problem is that David Ellison does not have that money. So he’s borrowing it. Not him personally. No, he wants to make the new, combined company take on $79 billion in debt. According to The Wall Street Journal, Larry Ellison allegedly informed White House officials that a Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. would result in an overhaul of reporting at CNN. In a possible preview of what’s to come, 60 Minutes has seen an exodus of senior reporters; correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi claimed she was pushed out for “refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”Democrats have denounced the merger. Just recently, 12 Democratic state attorneys general sued to stop the transaction, and it is now on hold until as late as June of next year. Yet if you focus on the fact that it’s Democrats suing Trump-aligned Republicans, you see only half the story; the fight can look like politics as usual. When you focus on the money, however, you see a looming economic calamity. I’m not the only one who sees it. In April, over a thousand people from across the entertainment industry wrote an open letter calling for the merger to be blocked. They also focused on the economics, warning that the deal would result in “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences.” There are now well over 5,000 signers to the letter. Yet the impact of the deal on the people who actually make film and television remains out of focus. So, last month, alongside the Writers Guild and other groups opposed to this merger, I went on a listening tour of three cities that it would hit the hardest—Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta. At each stop, we focused little on politics but far more on the workers “below the line”—an industry term for all the writers, actors, and blue-collar workers who never make the top billing on a movie poster. I heard anger and despair. I saw glimmers of a broader coalition that might one day fight corporate takeovers. And I experienced Paramount’s bizarre attempts to smear us. II.People think “Hollywood” is rich, glamorous, and famous. It’s Oprah and Ryan Reynolds. It’s an Ozempiced executive lunching poolside with George Clooney. The reality? “Hollywood” is the 20 people who apply to be their waiter. “Hollywood” has no pool and, often, no health insurance. And for years now, “Hollywood” is not just in Hollywood, or even Los Angeles—it’s in New York and Jersey City; it’s in Atlanta and Savannah; it’s in Nashville and Baton Rouge and Kentucky and Miami. The vast majority of people who work in film and television are not studio executives, nor are they famous actors. They are, overwhelmingly, blue-collar workers, freelancers, and small businesses. And they are in free fall.According to the Future Film Coalition, a grassroots organization that helped organize the meetings, L.A. county has seen almost one in three of its film jobs disappear. Half the sales that used to happen at the nation’s top film festivals now do not happen. More than half of documentaries now made do not make any money. “A decade ago, the casual conversation between peers would be: What are you working on now?” said an actress at the Los Angeles town hall. “Now it’s: Are you working?”The decline came from multiple causes, including a Covid-era collapse in productions, a race to the bottom on tax credits, and the writers’ and actors’ strikes giving studios an excuse to run those shoots abroad. The people we met understood that. But they couldn’t stop talking about the waves of layoffs that had followed waves of mergers. Adam Conover—the only above-the-line actor who spoke at any of the meetings—told a dizzying story about the life and death of his investigative comedy series, Adam Ruins Everything. He had pitched the show to Discovery, Comedy Central, TNT, TBS, and truTV, among others; truTV bought it because their new president wanted to compete with Comedy Central. “We employed about 100 people for the time we shot the show, and then countless contractors, caterers, et cetera,” Conover said. “We manufactured television for five years here in Los Angeles.” Another 100 people worked in an office building in midtown Manhattan cutting the show’s ads and setting its marketing strategy. Then AT&T bought truTV’s parent company, Time Warner. AT&T put truTV, TNT, and TBS under one manager, who then called Adam, fired Adam, and fired every person working for the show. Then AT&T sold all those channels and merged them with Discovery, which put the channels under new management that fired the guy who fired Adam. Now Paramount, which bought Comedy Central, wants to buy all those channels, which would combine most of the channels that competed to buy the show in the first place.“Hollywood is what it is,” Conover reflected, because people could “sell something into an open market, sell an idea, then employ hundreds and thousands of people underneath them—that created the media ecosystem that caused America to be a cultural power in the world, and created all the wonderful media that we love. And it’s about to die.” Paramount, of course, had a different take. “Generally, we are very empathetic to the folks in Hollywood,” their top lawyer, Makan Delrahim, told the Los Angeles Times a few days before the town hall. “But this transaction will actually create more and better and exciting jobs.” Other mergers may kill jobs, Delrahim seemed to be saying. But David Ellison and David Zaslav—the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery—have no intention of firing people.We held our town halls at the Lumiere Cinema in Los Angeles, the Writers Guild headquarters in New York, and the Plaza Theater in Atlanta. Each room was filled with people who had been fired by Ellison and Zaslav. There was the writer in Los Angeles laid off by Paramount after Ellison bought it. She was late on rent. “I don’t have any prospects. My severance has run out. Unemployment is about to run out,” she said. But she insisted that she was happier now because of how poorly she had been treated since Ellison took over.There was the writer in New York who was developing a show with Charlize Theron about a mom and her trans teen in the Texas Panhandle. That writer, Jacob Tobia, was fired the moment Zaslav took over Warner Bros. and became the CEO of the company Ellison is now buying. “They didn’t even allow me to complete my contract or finish revising the pilot script before they made the decision,” Tobia said. “It was axed mid-revision. They paid me out and told me essentially to go away.”Writing for film or TV may sound cushy. Maybe it once was. Now, an L.A. expat in New York explained, “There’s no jobs at the bottom of the rung anymore.” The entry-level position in writing—the writers’ production assistant—has been eliminated. So the people working the next rung of jobs are really working “two jobs, for $20 an hour, in Los Angeles.” The living wage in L.A. is around $30. Local Starbucks baristas make $20. III.Any gauzy mirage we may have had of life in the industry was wiped away in Atlanta, where our meeting was dominated not by writers or actors but by about a dozen members of Local 479 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents the technicians and craftspeople who work behind the camera or between takes. Unlike the Writers Guild, IATSE’s national leaders have never called for the merger to be blocked. As I introduced myself, each person was careful to tell me that they were there to speak for themselves, not their union. A tightly wound thirtysomething named Roger Thacher stood waiting near the popcorn station. He had a beard and wore glasses, an olive-green baseball cap, and a black, orange, and green Hawaiian shirt—his old crew’s “Friday uniform,” he was quick to note. “Otherwise I look wildly unprofessional.”Roger gave me a sad smile. He thanked me for holding the event. He told me about his work as an assistant prop master. “That laptop behind you, that smartphone in her hand?” he said, gesturing to my colleague who was sitting at a nearby table. “I’m the guy who makes sure those have green screens. I’m the guy who tracks the amount of water in every glass that shows up in the shoot. I’m the invisible job behind the invisible job.” But he seemed to be holding something back.When the event began, I called on him in the audience. He stood and explained that he had joined the industry in 2017 and joined IATSE one year later. Business was booming then. “Many of us wondered how sustainable all this could be,” he said. “Our fears were realized after the last big Disney consolidation,” he said. He had been working on a Hulu show that was shooting at a local college 10 minutes east of Atlanta. “Then Disney finished their acquisition of Hulu—100 percent—and suddenly, our job moved across the border to Canada.” He paused, then went on: “I used to shave my head for set to look clean for my work. My last day on a union job was the day we lost our first child to miscarriage. After a month,” he said, his voice breaking, “I noticed I was getting a little fuzzy up there. So I decided to have a little bit of fun—I’ll let it go until I work a union show again.” Roger took off his hat. Long black hair fell over his shoulders. “My hair is now down to the middle of my back. And I have a beautiful son at home who is 13 months old.” He considered himself lucky; he had worked in another industry before. “I knew I would be OK,” he said. But he couldn’t say the same for his friends. “I hosted dinners for colleagues who lost 80 percent of their salary. I helped friends pack up and leave the state because they couldn’t afford their house.” An older woman named Laurie Garner spoke a few minutes later. She stayed seated. She had worked in film and TV in Atlanta since the early 1990s, mostly in the art and prop departments. Her IMDB page lists credits from Watchmen, Atlanta, The Hunger Games, and Pitch Perfect, among dozens of others. This was a craftsperson who was recruited for the most prominent productions in Georgia.Garner’s voice was unsteady; the right side of her face was limp. “I cannot afford health insurance because I have no work,” she said. “I haven’t worked since 2024, on Stranger Things.” That year, the Art Directors Guild suspended its job training program, telling applicants in an email that “we cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession while so many of our members remain unemployed.”CEOs often say they won’t do mass layoffs after a merger—they’ll just fire the underperformers. When I think about that, I think about a filmmaker named Christalyn Hampton who was in the back row of the Plaza. She wore dreads under a black Falcons hat. Her documentary about a local abortion clinic, The Devil Is Busy, had just been nominated for an Academy Award.“Even though I was recently nominated for an Oscar, it’s not like jobs are flowing in for me,” she said. “A lot of my documentaries about social justice? There’s no place for those. The mandates in a lot of these industries are true crime, cults, and celebrities.” Paramount’s financing for the merger illustrates this dynamic. When you’re $80 billion in the hole, you don’t ask yourself: How am I going to tell an amazing story? You ask yourself: How the hell am I going to pay these guys back? And how can I absolutely guarantee that this next show will make money? You don’t take risks. You play it safe. And people like Christalyn Hampton are out of work, and her ideas about social justice won’t make it to your screen. Toward the end of the session, a set decorator named Jamie Rosegren stood up in the front. She was the business agent for Local 479, although she too clarified that she was speaking for herself. Her union had 5,400 members; around 2,000 were in arrears because they had no work. “Now that people don’t have that work, they don’t know what to do with themselves,” she said. “We’ve seen more suicide. We’ve seen larger instances of depression among our crew.” Atlanta was the home of Ted Turner’s media empire, which had merged with Time Warner, then AOL, then AT&T, then Discovery—each one generating another round of layoffs. The Paramount merger would be merger number five. Ethan Tussey, a Georgia State professor, told the crowd Turner properties used to employ 8,000 people in Atlanta. Now, it was less than 3,000. IV.Monday morning after our town hall at the Lumiere, a three-screen independent theater in Los Angeles, I drove to KCRW’s studios at Santa Monica College for an interview with Kim Masters, an institution in entertainment reporting. Masters played a clip of a CNBC interview with Ellison in which he said the deal would be “good for the creator economy” and “good for Hollywood.”   I told Masters that Ellison’s math did not work. And it doesn’t, on a couple of levels. According to Ellison, the deal will generate “$6 billion in synergies”—Wall Street’s word for the cost cuts that follow a merger, usually in the form of sweeping layoffs. Yet Ellison insisted that most of the savings would not come from layoffs. “Nobody believes that,” said NYU professor Scott Galloway. “It’s going to be difficult to cut billions in snacks.”The bigger picture doesn’t work, either. Paramount is promising to make payments on $79 billion in loans, promising to stop spending $6 billion elsewhere—while also promising to put more movies in theaters than any studio has ever done in modern history.My children tease me with something they call “monkey math.” I, the pedant, fall for it every time. It goes like this. I’ll be driving them to school or making sure they brush their teeth, and one of them will say: “Papa, what’s two plus two?”I grimace, lower my head, and say “four.”“No!” they scream, overjoyed. “It’s 22!” As I start to say, “No, it’s no–,” they holler, “It’s monkey math!”Ellison is trying to convince people two plus two is 22. Fitch has downgraded his company’s credit to junk status.Masters and I talked about the deal for about 25 minutes, touching on its impact on labor, on Paramount’s purge at 60 Minutes, and the legal cases against the merger. Then she seemed to get a little uncomfortable, and she asked me one last question. She had also read the L.A. Times interview where Paramount general counsel Delrahim touted “more and better and exciting jobs.” But she had noticed a different part, where Delrahim said that our coalition was engaged in a “fearmongering” political campaign and that “some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction really because of their own antisemitic views.”What did I think of that? I called it what it was—a distraction, and a curious one from a man representing a company whose takeover bid was backed by $24 billion from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. That was a Monday. That Thursday, a frothy New York Post article cited “a source involved in the merger” who said that the coalition trying to block it was “completely driven by antisemitism and socialism.” It’s all fun and games until you fire 6,000 people while earning $21.2 million a month.V.Another thing I learned at the FTC is that while a particular merger fight in a particular industry may feel existential to the people in that industry, it can be hard to get people outside of it to notice, let alone to care. In 2023, for example, FTC staff blocked a pharmaceutical company’s effort to maintain a monopoly over treatments for Pompe disease, a horrific genetic condition that kills children before their first birthday. If you google the case, almost all the coverage comes from the finance and pharma trade press—and the white-shoe law firms litigating similar deals. And so it caught my eye when a soybean grower and cattleman from Iowa, Lance Lillibridge, posted this message on Facebook in May:As a farmer, watching the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. merger debate sounds awfully familiar. A handful of dominant firms get bigger, independent businesses lose leverage, and the people actually creating the product get squeezed harder and harder. Farmers have lived this story for decades through consolidation in inputs and retail. Now more industries are starting to see the same thing happen to them.A few days after I saw the post, I interviewed him alongside Kirby Dick, an Emmy- and Polk-award winning documentarian, for the Organized Money podcast. I wanted to know—how did he make these connections?For Lance, it was all pretty straightforward. His wife is physically disabled from multiple sclerosis, so he spends a lot of time with her watching movies and television shows. “Back when I was a kid, there was a lot of different things to watch—today it’s all about crime. It’s all about who killed who on the farm,” he said. “We’ve got that same thing going on,” he said, about farmers. Farmers like Lance used to have a dozen different companies to buy seed from; now they have two. If there was very little seed choice, there were “no choices in where you get your fertilizer from, who’s manufacturing it.… The consolidation is tremendous and crippling. The fertilizer companies are making more off an acre of land than we are right now. And that’s disgusting.”On July 13, California Attorney General Rob Bonta stood on a hill in front of the HOLLYWOOD sign and announced a lawsuit, on behalf of himself and 11 other state attorneys general, to block the Paramount-Warner merger. The law enforcers called out Paramount’s monkey math, arguing that the takeover would mean fewer movies for higher prices, and would also lead to higher cable bills. The next day, the Writers Guild announced its own lawsuit to block the merger on the grounds that it would collapse key labor markets for its members. A third lawsuit, filed the same day by a company shareholder, alleged that the Ellisons had effectively bribed President Trump in order to secure his approval of the merger. Soon after that, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the company from merging for two weeks, then extended the order for two weeks; then Paramount agreed to delay merging until next June unless the court issues a ruling before then—a stunning reversal for a company that was so confident the deal would sail through regulatory approvals.  Billionaires usually get what they want. They get the government they want, the health care they want, and they break the laws they want, so long as they make the right donations or crypto investments.This case asks: Maybe not this time?As for next time, I’m still thinking about my conversation with Lance Lillibridge—and documentarian Kirby Dick’s reaction to hearing the anger and hopelessness on independent farms across the country. I had just shared what it was like to watch fourth- or fifth-generation farmers break down in tears because their business was going bankrupt, or because they were scared that a powerful supplier would learn that they had spoken to an FTC commissioner. Lance had just talked about how he was shielding his 20-year-old son, who was set on going into farming, from their family’s financial difficulties: “He doesn’t really have an interest to do anything else.” Something about those scenes clicked for Kirby. “I don’t think people see this issue this way,” he said. “They see it as either a complex issue or something that’s not related to them personally.” He chuckled and added: “When you started describing that, I sort of just leaned in, like, Where can I get my camera? How can I cover that?”

There is what happened, and then there is the story of it, the “required repetition of the good story over and over again to friends, family, more officials.” In Dog Days, her memoir of living in the wake of a terrifying event, Emily LaBarge recounts watching people react to her story—what she calls, varyingly, “the good story, It, That Awful Thing That Happened, That Christmas, The Incident, What Your Family Went Through, The Thing, The Home Invasion, and sometimes—though rarely, as it seems too explicit, sometimes embarrassing, which victimhood, because it is helpless, often feels—The Trauma.” Some cannot believe it. Some shrug her off, don’t call her back. Some say they are traumatized by what happened to her and they themselves “will never feel safe again.”“Some,” she writes, in disbelief, “cry!!” Some fish for details, trying to suss out whether LaBarge was raped. “Imagine,” she writes, “asking someone, casually, as if it were the ultimate salacious detail. They think it is their business, that it is information they are entitled to.” Sylvia Plath called these people “the peanut-crunching crowd” in her poem of death and resurrection, “Lady Lazarus.” In drafts of this book, LaBarge writes, she tried holding off, leaving the big story until the end—but that was “too coy”—and she tried not telling it at all, subsuming it as criticism or philosophy. In the finished version, she neither hides what happened nor accedes to demands for salacious detail.What happened is this: In the days before Christmas in 2009, when LaBarge was in her mid-twenties, she and her family were renting a house on a “low-lying coral island in the Atlantic Ocean where the waters are cyan, turquoise, azure blue and the sand is the finest pink-flecked white.” Eight men broke in and held the family hostage for seven hours. They had been watching Mrs. Doubtfire when it happened, and the movie, absurdly, continued to play as they were lying there, until, eventually, one of the men switched it off, putting on, instead, a CD of hymns, liturgical chants, and songs for a death mass. “He doesn’t want anyone to be able to hear us,” LaBarge realizes, “when we XXX or XXXX or XXXXX or X.” Whole pages unfold like this, details marked with X’s, lines blacked out. These gaps are a refusal to perform what Plath called “the big strip tease” for the detail-hungry gawker, but they are also the gaps in a glitching memory. “I did not hear them coming,” LaBarge writes of the men as they broke in. “Maybe I heard them coming. I did. I did not.” She remembers being hurt by a therapist who left a detailed email unread for too long and then responded with too little, but when, in the process of writing this book, she looks back at her inbox to confirm her recollection, she sees that, actually, the therapist had sent a long and loving response in less than 24 hours. She remembers the layout of the vacation home on the island, but when she looks for it later, she can’t find a house that matches.The gaps in the story are a refusal to perform what Sylvia Plath called “the big strip tease” for the detail-hungry gawker, but they are also the gaps in a glitching memory.But certain things stick. As Fauré’s Requiem plays, while she lies on the floor with her family, it begins to sound, to LaBarge, like “a family death mass. The End.” As soon as she thinks this, she “cannot not think this.” This is a memoir about what happens after The End—what happens when you feel like you’ve died, and what happens when you go on living anyway, about how trauma repeats and reverberates. “It might change your life, you might survive, and then what?” LaBarge asks. What happens, that is, after a resurrection? LaBarge is not religious, but she is fascinated by Jesus, by his encounter with Mary Magdalene in the garden after he rises from the dead, just as she is fascinated by Plath’s nine-lived Lady Lazarus, by Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life—all stories of people who live on after death; who die, but not quite (“But I already died,” LaBarge tells a friend who warns that hard partying will kill her, “almost, I mean, almost”).“We survive, we do,” LaBarge writes, “but The End comes again and again, comes at surprising times, unbidden and with great force, summoned by images, asides, happenstance, like an errant punctuation mark—why does this sentence have two colons?—that splits time, kaleidoscopic, in multiple directions at once.” Trauma estranges LaBarge, or me, or you, or any person from oneself; it makes grammar, syntax, and form strange. Dog Days, a fusion of memoir, criticism, psychoanalysis, and even scientific theory, makes this stuttering sensation its structuring principle, as the book changes forms and perspectives, doubles back. It is less about what happened to her than how she might tell it; about the mysterious, alchemical process of writing, the transubstantiation of living into language.After The Incident, LaBarge recalls talking to a friend of her mother’s on the phone. The friend tells her it is “an amazing story,” that she can write about it and get rich; other writers, after all, have done that, capitalizing on the worst things that ever happened to them. “I remember thinking that’s crazy,” LaBarge writes. “No way will I ever write this story.”And yet, of course, here it is, in our hands. “Why do some of us need to take notes, try to piece things together, want to know what it all means?” she wonders, and she wonders, too, what is the cost of all this. She quotes a Lorrie Moore story about a writer whose child has renal cancer. “Take notes,” her husband tells her. “We are going to need the money.” She takes notes, this writer, but she cannot think of what is happening—the illness, the cost of care—as a story. The story ends with a blunt demand: “There are the notes. Now where is the money?” LaBarge, taking her own notes, wants to know what the price is, what is the value, of the worst thing that ever happened to you. She is aware that “the non-fiction writer has a Faustian bargain with the page, which promises meaning if life—sometimes her own—is adequately harvested for experience.” This is what writers do; they try to transform life into “words, sentences, paragraphs, make it last forever.”Perhaps what LaBarge recoils from, then, on that phone call, is not the writing but the story. Trauma is “a narrative problem because there is no story”—it is an absence, endlessness, a derangement of action and consequence—but at the same time, she writes, “I do not believe there is anything language cannot do.” Trauma, LaBarge suggests, is not unwritable or unreadable, “in spite of the constant emphasis on the ‘unspeakable’ aspects of trauma.” The problem is the demand to make the experience of trauma neat, narrative, acceptable. She quotes the historian Paul Fussell, who wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory that “we have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.” This is the obverse, in some ways, to the problem of the peanut-crunchers; there are things people do not, really, want to know.LaBarge is a stunningly talented critic and a gifted close reader, a practice that becomes central to her life in the years after That Awful Thing That Happened. She seeks comfort in stories “in which it seems as though something undefinable is missing, has been lost, in which there is some shapeless hole to be filled,” but she also searches the world for portents, a way of fending off fear. The trees scold her, and birds follow her, screeching ominously. She inexplicably hears classical music on the escalator down to the tube station and thinks it is trying to tell her something. She sees people she knows on the street, spying on her, but they dissolve into unknown faces on a second look.Dog Days lends itself to exactly this kind of paranoid reading, not only describing but enacting the magical thinking of trauma survivors. In an extended analysis of Nabakov’s short story “Signs and Symbols,” about exactly this tendency to search for meaning, she asks, “What does it mean that the mother accidentally drops three specific playing cards to the floor, the knave of hearts, the nine of spades, the ace of spades?” A handful of pages earlier, she has recounted a tarot card reading someone did for her. “The card turned up for me—was it the Page of Wands? The Two of Coins? The Fool?” These are cards that speak to change and chaos, chance and possibility, innocence and exposure. What does it mean? La Barge writes that she reconceived this book “at least three times before starting and at least three times as it unfolds.” She tries writing it straight, she tries writing it beautifully, she tries not writing about The Thing at all. “I think,” she writes, “that if I see it plotted out correctly I will know, that gut feelings, and the container will give meaning to chaos or at least hold it in place.” It is an alluring and impossible idea, that the narrative problem of trauma can be solved, that order can be restored. She wants to know “how to accept this and move on without losing my mind or the part of me that believes in humanity, safety, hope, ha, right, trust, intimacy, connection, bodily integrity, justice, compassion. How did I ever believe in so many fake and stupid things, and how do I continue in a world of people who still do?”This search takes the form of a search for a form; the book is a restless experiment in ways of telling, by turns hectic and languorous, echoing the dilations of time LaBarge experiences in the wake of That Christmas. She details the drafting of the Schedule of Loss—the “official title for what must be given to an insurance company or any kind of court or tribunal issued with loss compensation. Laptop, clothes, jewelry, books, dignity, mind.” She recounts her newly sleepless nights and faltering memory, her investigation into one of the hostage-takers’ whereabouts, her obsessive search for a way to make sense of a world she can no longer see in the same light. She writes digressively, essayistically, about the moon and the stars. Part of the book takes on a screenplay-like form, with lines and stage directions (“It sounds like a movie!” those she tells the good story to often say, grotesquely—and yet, LaBarge does think to herself, surveying the wrecked aftermath of the house on the unnamed island in the Atlantic, that it looks like a film). Trauma is a narrative problem because it does not have a story’s beginning-middle-end; The End goes on and on. It scrambles chronology as the book scrambles form and perspective.Trauma is a narrative problem because it does not have a story’s beginning-middle-end; The End goes on and on. “I do not remember some things that happened in the first person,” LaBarge writes, “I only remember them in the second, third, omniscient, limited.” The book, fittingly, moves between these modes; LaBarge is sometimes Daughter, sometimes Sister, sometimes I. She breaks into second-person address toward the end of the book. “You remember a friend telling you” about someone else who was also robbed at gunpoint on the same island in the Atlantic, a startling sign that even the most singular experiences are shared. “You read books about domestic abuse, child abuse, veterans with PTSD, survivors of genocide,” she writes, “and feel guilty for identifying even vaguely with their terminologies, though you cannot find any others to learn about your own experience.” This guilt is natural, but unhelpful. “You prefer empathy to individualism.”The movement to You reflects the distortions of traumatic memory that LaBarge describes, and it also reflects what she comes to see as the collective, interpersonal nature of trauma. While trauma feels profoundly isolating, in attempting to make sense of it, she finds herself always in association with other people, both as she searches for ways to understand her experience through the stories of others and because, when she does tell this story, it is always being told to someone else. This move into the second person, then, is an extension of her method of processing trauma through art, literature, and film. “If you”—yes, you!—“can’t see, for instance, that you’re already dead, that you died with six-year-old Hind Rajab, shot to death with 335 bullets as she waited hours in a car, surrounded by dead family members, for the paramedics to arrive,” LaBarge writes, “then you have to stay here, in the old world,” the world of linear time, of a knowable self, of a good story.The alternative, for LaBarge, is to choose not to be “singular, individual, alone, in spite of this state so profoundly defining the experience of trauma.” Instead, one might choose to be radically connected to others, to listen to their stories and to see oneself in them. Language, LaBarge writes, “is representational but it is also relational.” It is, fundamentally, a means of communication, and the limits of what it can do are the limits of “what can be heard, what can be tolerated, what can be borne by both teller and told.” We have a duty, she seems to say, to listen and to witness, to choose not to seal ourselves off, alone. This is the path out of the old world, into the new. The End. And then what?

By chronicling the shame of lynching in the South, Ida B. Wells exposed the corruption of white supremacy. The post Ida B. Wells: Brave Woman appeared first on The American Prospect.

Meanwhile, FIFA announced that it is planning to sell a major stake in the World Cup to a Kushner family firm.

CBS’s 60 Minutes is getting another Trump-styled makeover.Conservative columnist Ross Douthat is leaving The New York Times to join the storied broadcast magazine in a new role, 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton announced Tuesday.Douthat has served as one of the Times’ principal conservative voices for more than two decades, writing for the daily’s opinion section since 2009. His latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, was published in 2025.Despite being an early skeptic of Donald Trump’s politics and popularity, Douthat has since downplayed the president’s authoritarian and fascist tendencies while attempting to rationalize Trump’s behavior.He has also criticized Democrats for their “resistance” showcases, spurring condemnation from those on the left that Douthat has been incorporated into a sort of “anti-anti-Trump” persona among the American intelligentsia, apparently ready to castigate Trump’s critics even as he himself scrutinizes the president and his policies.Douthat will join the show alongside author Sebastian Junger, CBS News correspondent Trevor Phillips, and filmmaker Gianna Toboni, according to Bilton.Bari Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist herself, has changed seemingly everything at CBS News since she was tapped to run the fabled network late last year. Weiss was appointed despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on now former correspondent Cecilia Vega’s 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison.The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from Vega to 60 Minutes’ veteran executive producer Bill Owens and the program’s de facto face Scott Pelley.In March, Weiss attempted to install another questionable commentator in the show’s lineup—wellness influencer and Epstein pen pal Peter Attia—though his job offer was quickly revoked.

Antitrust is poking tiny holes in oligopoly’s dark cloak; is the light winning? The post Organized Money: The Rollup of All Media Is No Longer Inevitable (with Adam Conover) appeared first on The American Prospect.