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One of the central grievances among the American Right over the last decade, a grievance I have long shared, was the grave dangers posed by the secretive “Deep State,” as well as its accompanying system of mass surveillance aimed at the American population. What had long been a core concern of the American Left for decades previously gained space and credibility among many on the American Right for multiple reasons, including the obvious weaponization of those powers for political ends and the abuse of those powers particularly to target and undermine Donald Trump, his campaigns, his administrations and his movement. As a result, overthrowing this Deep State order and/or radically reforming it was one of the top two or three promises core to the MAGA movement. 

Several of Donald Trump's early picks to lead the agencies most responsible for these powers were longtime critics of these abuses and were thus promising signs to many of his seriousness in rooting out these abuses. People like Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence and Kash Patel as FBI Director and Matt Gaetz as Attorney General were all so controversial in Washington precisely because they did not emerge from these agencies and were not expected to protect and perpetuate those agencies, but rather to cleanse and reform their worst, most long-standing abuses. 

But the focus on Trump's choices to lead these federal agencies has often obscured one vital fact about the Deep State and about the Surveillance State, which it has constructed. Much of the sinister work is carried out increasingly not by public agencies, but by privatized intelligence and military contractors who not only now develop and oversee the weapons used against the American people but profit greatly from doing so. 

This is not new. That was the model warned about, of course, by Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, where he notably referred not to the dangers of the Pentagon, but to the military-complex, precisely to emphasize the vital role that privatized and corporatized interests were playing in what should be government functions. That component of that formulation, the privatization, the corporatization, has only grown exponentially in the 75 years since that warning was issued. 

As the Trump administration now takes form after several months, there is no doubt about the big winner of the sweepstakes to become the head of the new privatized Deep State. It is the firm called Palantir, first founded in 2002 by the billionaire Peter Thiel and the multibillionaire Alex Karp back then to capitalize on the opportunities of surveillance and militarization that they perceived correctly, were presented by the War on Terror, and they have now become absolutely central – one could say virtually omnipotent – within the Trump administration and its various intelligence and military apparatus. 

As a result, understanding what Palantir is, what its capabilities are and what its driving ideology has become is indispensable to understanding whether this Deep State and Surveillance State part of our government is really being reformed and constrained, or whether it is simply being privatized in a far more concentrated, technologically sophisticated, powerful and sinister way than ever before. 

The sinister part of our government that has become known as the Deep State, the secretive part of our government, the Intelligence community, the Surveillance State – lots of different names for it, everyone knows, of course, what it is that we're talking about. We're talking about the part of the government that was created by Harry Truman's 1947 National Security Act that fostered, among other things, the precursor to the CIA, all kinds of new powers vested in the government under the guise of combating communism and the rise of the Soviet Union after World War II, which became this kind of Frankenstein that continued to grow and grow and grow far beyond what anyone ever envisioned it would be. 

In fact, it became so powerful so quickly, that only 14 years later, in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower, who, needless to say was no leftist, a five-star general and national hero, concluded that those agencies had become so secretive, so out of control and so rogue that they were becoming more powerful even than the office of the presidency. Often, they were acting without his knowledge, without his approval, even by deceiving him. 

And it wasn't just the public agencies; it was their union with the military corporations and the intelligence contractors that were forming this complex that was antidemocratic at its core. Over the decades, we've seen again and again how these powers were misused throughout the 1960s against various social justice movements, during the ‘70s, when there was finally supposed to be some reform in the form of the Church Commission, in 1977, that was really more symbolic than anything else, things like creating a Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee or the FISA Court are designed to control the way the government can spy on American citizens. 

Yet, through the '80s and the '90s, these powers only fortified; these supposed safeguards became more and more illusory. Once the War on Terror happened, all bets were off. The reliance by the Bush-Cheney administration first and then by the Obama administration led to an expansion and explosion of these powers that were previously unimaginable, even by the people warning about them in the ‘60s and the '70s, in part because – I would say primarily because – they ceased being directed outward at our adversaries, or even our allies, and instead became directed inward at American citizens in violation of the Constitution. 

The more that happened, the more acceptable it became, the more it expanded, the more it grew to the point where, by 2016, we saw very clearly how much the CIA, the FBI and the NSA were willing to interfere directly in our national elections and our domestic politics through all sorts of domestic propaganda. Concerns about this part of the government, these agencies, were primarily left-wing focused. That happened because a lot of the left-wing movements were targeted by them in the '60s and '70s. There was always kind of an anti-federal-government strain of the American right that also was deeply concerned about the NSA and the powers of federal agencies and the standing armies and law enforcement and armed agents of the state that the federal government maintained permanently, that were never supposed to be part of the design of our government but by and large, the Republican establishment, the American conservative movement, largely had been defending that until they began to see very clearly as well, principally because of how those powers were abused to spy on the Trump campaign, to spread propaganda and lies and artificial scandals like Russiagate and the lies about the Hunter Biden laptop and all sorts of other things to sabotage the Trump campaign, to sabotage the Trump presidency, just how out of control and how politicized these agencies had become, of course, culminating in the ultimate attempt to stop Donald Trump from winning in 2024 by using the ultimate lawfare against him, indicting him in four different jurisdictions for crimes that could barely even be called those. 

That created a serious sentiment among, I would say, mainstream conservatism, that the Surveillance State, the Deep State, the secretive part of our government was so out of control and that one of the top priorities of a new Trump administration was going to be, and must be, to clean that out, to rein that in, to constrain it back to what its real function is supposed to be, in the case of the FBI, doing real law enforcement against actual violent criminals, or organized gangs, or organized crime, not spying on and trying to criminalize your political opponents and your political enemies; in the case of the NSA, spying on foreign terrorist organizations, or another kind of international criminal organizations, not spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law; in the cases of the CIA, focusing on and collecting intelligence to inform the president, not interfering in and trying to manipulate and manufacture scandals for our domestic politics. This became central to what the Trump movement said it wanted, what Donald Trump and his new victory in 2024 represented. 

As I said, several of Donald Trump's choices to lead these agencies were clearly designed to send a signal that we're not going to pick people from these agencies who are indoctrinated in the ways that they exercise power, who are going to be there to simply defend the prerogatives of the agencies. We're going to choose outsiders, people who have been critical of how these powers have been abused, to go in and start cleaning them out. 

Those notably became the most controversial choices of Donald Trump's cabinet, not the people who wanted to perpetuate the status quo, not the people who were comfortable within these agencies and the powers that they exercised and the way they functioned, but the people who were designed to be outsiders to radically transform them. People like RFK Jr., when it came to Health and Human Services, but then Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel and Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, the people that were clearly there to radically root it out. That was a promising sign on the part of the Trump administration that that was something they intended to do. 

I think, though, two things got overlooked in all of that. One is the obvious tendency of people who oppose abuses of power when they're out of power, who believe that power needs to be constrained because it's exercised by their political opponents or in the hands of their political enemies and so insist that this power needs to be restrained. There's always a tendency once people get back into power to want to use the power to preserve it, even to expand it, and to believe that they're doing so in the name of something more noble, just, benevolent and less abusive, which is always one of the main challenges of using our two-party system to try to radically reform the government, namely, that people out of power have all the reason in the world to oppose and to object to certain powers inherent in the federal government, but when they get into office, there's a tendency to want to use those. That's always a danger. 

I think, however, the much bigger danger is that – and this is probably something that wasn't emphasized enough perhaps even by our show – so much of this Surveillance State, so much of the Deep State, the military and intelligence functions are overseen and manufactured, not by federal agencies as they ought to be. These are state powers, and they ought to be subject to state control by government agencies that are subject to the laws and transparency requirements, and democratic accountability, at least in theory, of being overseen by Congress and the courts. Instead, over the last couple of decades, they have been increasingly privatized, so that the actual entities that have run our military and intelligence agencies are not the NSA or the Pentagon; it is Booz Allen Hamilton, or Boeing, or Northrop Grumman, or Raytheon. Sometimes, they send their own executives into those agencies to make sure that their prerogatives are protected. Joe Biden's Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, came right from the board of Raytheon. 

So, it is a very integrated system of power, but in many ways, it's the privatized function of this system that often reigns supreme and there's always, as a result, a very intense competition, not only because of the power it bestows only, but especially because of the profits that it generates for whoever gets to be the primary contractor, the primary corporatized weapon of the Deep State. So you can reform the rules of these agencies, you can change the personnel, but as long as you have the outsourced, privatized corporations motivated to consolidate power, and especially to generate profit, which goes hand in hand, there really isn't any reform. In fact, the opposite is true. You will get continuous abuse. Maybe the names will change, maybe now it's not Booz Allen Hamilton, maybe it's now Palantir, but the system itself doesn't really change. 

We have seen signs from the White House and there's good reason to have seen this coming, a lot of people who are very closely aligned with, have been invested in and closely connected to the people who run these corporations, especially Palantir, became instrumental in financing the Trump campaign, which played a major role in the transition of Mar-a-Lago.

You could kind of see the signs that while a lot of people were railing against the old guard of the military-industrial complex, Boeing and Northrop Grumman and those types, a more technologically sophisticated kind of newer version of the corporatized Surveillance State was starting to gain power within the Trump world for all sorts of reasons that they had schemed and planned for, devoted a lot of money to Trump's campaign and I think we're now clearly seeing the fruits of that. It's time to really take a close look at exactly what is happening, principally with a corporation called Palantir at the center of it all. 

It's not just Palantir replacing other older versions of what might look like the old guard of the military-industrial complex. Palantir itself is a very extremist company in all sorts of ways, in terms of their vision of the future, in terms of the ethical constraints they do and don't believe in and, most of all, because of the ideology that their leaders,  their founders, that the people who run Palantir and now run various parts of the Surveillance State and military-industrial complex vehemently and passionately believe in and obviously are using those powers to advance those beliefs in a way that I think has gotten way too little attention. 

So, let's begin with the official starting point of when it became apparent that room was being made for new types of corporatized spying companies and militarized companies to acquire new power and new roles. 

One of them was an executive order issued by the White House and unveiled on March 20, 2025, two months after Donald Trump's inauguration. The headline of which was: “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos (The White House. March 20, 2025.)

In other words, the problem, according to the new White House, is that information is not centralized enough. You have some information segregated over here, some segregated over there, some surveillance data here, some under this other agency, and they describe that as wasteful. What they want to do is to centralize it all under one authority. 

Personally, I would prefer that, to the extent the government collects data on American citizens, it remains fragmented and siloed and therefore weakened. However, the point of this executive order was to describe that as wasteful and to restructure the government to ensure its centralization, meaning its consolidated control under a handful of specific actors who would be in charge of it. 

Just let me emphasize that – and a part of this has to do with trying to empower what was known as DOGE, that the idea was we had to ensure that the DOGE team wasn't impeded in their ability to collect information, instead having access to everything. So here you see that the idea is to make certain to eliminate bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency by ensuring that there are no more barriers to federal employees accessing government data. 

Like most government programs, this could have a very benign intent, and it's described to appear benign. It's saying, “Look, there are some inefficiencies, we need to analyze all the data, unfortunately, the data is all siloed, it's all in different places and we want to make sure that we eliminate all of the barriers to accessing all of it. We want to be sure that designated entities, whether public like DOGE or private like private contractors, no longer experience impediments in collecting all the information and centralizing it all for whatever purposes they want to use that information.” 

As I said, one of the primary impetuses for this was to make sure that the team of DOGE that was designed to analyze waste and the like didn't have any further impediments to their ability to get at some of the most sensitive data about American citizens. 

Here's how CNN reported that in April 2025:

“They’re going to take the information we already have and put it into a system,” a Trump administration official told CNN about DOGE’s plans. “It will be able to rapidly queue information. Everyone is converting to Palantir.” (CNN. April 25, 2025.) So, that's the Trump administration's motto for what this reform is. Everyone is converting to Palantir, meaning all of this data collection, all of this data mining, all this access to information is all going to be done through Palantir, through devices and systems created by Palantir, implemented by Palantir, overseen by Palantir. 

Obviously, one reaction is to say, well, this seems like a good idea. I want the government to be able to more readily identify people who are in the country illegally; I want them to more readily identify fraud, so I have no problem with a system designed to centralize all this information to make it easier to achieve these noble ends. The problem is always how the expansion of the Surveillance State and the expansion of the Deep State are justified. They always give you a reason why they're doing it for your protection, why they are doing it for some good cause. 

All those programs ushered in in the wake of 9/11 and by the Bush-Cheney administration, the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance on American citizens, the vast elimination of barriers designed to protect the privacy rights of Americans, all of that was justified in the name of finding terrorists more easily. We didn't find terrorists on 9/11, even though we had all the reason and all the evidence and all that data in the world that should have let us find them, we failed to. So, instead of holding people accountable, instead of making sure that we're looking more closely for terrorists, instead of all sorts of other things, we’re going to claim that we didn't have enough spying powers, we didn't have enough data mining powers. We're going to tell the American people, “Look, we're going to collect information in a much more aggressive way, including about you, but don't worry, we are just doing it because we want to keep you safe from the terrorists.” 

If you look at how the Patriot Act has been used, ever since it was implemented, ever since that justification was furnished that convinced a lot of people to support it, you will find that only in a small minority of cases has the Patriot Act been invoked in connection with terrorism investigations. It has been using a wide range of other sorts of efforts to investigate the American people, to keep track of them, and to give to law enforcement. I know for the first 10 years, the percentage of cases of actual terrorism investigations that the Patriot Act was used for was extremely small, I'm talking about 10% to 12%, 15%. So, of course, they're going to offer you good reasons why Palantir needs to collect and consolidate all this information under its control. “Oh, we're looking for illegal immigrants, we're thinking of criminals,” and the ability to have all this information under one company and eliminate all the barriers that were there to keep, preserve the privacy rights of Americans from having, from living in, an omnipotent Surveillance State. Those are bothersome, those are impediments to the policy goals that we want to achieve and so don't worry, we're getting rid of all of those. We're going to have it all put under this one company called Palantir. As I said, “everyone is converting to Palantir” is the exact quote. 

This didn't get much attention at the time. In the Trump administration, there are constantly all sorts of things going on. You have wars going on, you have attempts to avoid war, like in Iran, you have all kinds of new domestic policies. There were controversies about deporting students who criticize Israel. All sorts of things are just constantly going around. And so, when the Trump Administration says, everything is going through Palantir, not enough people really paid much attention to that. Now people are starting to wonder, “Wait a minute, what exactly is the role of Palantir? Who is Palantir and what do they intend to do?” The New York Times ran a story just a couple of weeks ago, May 30, the title of which was: “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans.”

This is one of the things that I recall during the Snowden controversy and the reporting and the debates that it spawned, this extreme irony that we were able to reveal how invasive, how sweeping, how limitless the information was that the NSA, unbeknownst to everybody, was collecting on American citizens without the warrants required by the constitutional law. I remember very well, one day, the NSA kind of trying to scope around for different excuses, said, “Oh, don't worry, we're very, very vigilant in the security measures that we use, we keep your data very, very safe, you don't have to worry.” 

Of course, one of the reasons that was not a very satisfactory answer was that the concern was that the NSA itself was going to abuse that information and had done so. But also, it was very hard to say that “Oh, don't worry, these security systems are so unbreakable, so reliable” when Edward Snowden had just right under their noses taking enormous amounts of that data without having any slight idea on the part of the NSA that he had done so. So, so much of this sounds familiar. “Oh, don't worry, we are centralizing all data about you in an unprecedented way.” It's not just some of it is at the NSA, some of it at the IRS, some of it at the CDC and some of it at Homeland Security. We're now centralizing all those agencies in one private company, Palantir. And we're being asked to believe that Palantir's goals are benevolent. The people running Palantir are going to handle this information responsibly and without abuse and, somehow, this information will be kept safe so that others with more malevolent intentions are incapable of using it. 

I think it's very important to note that Palantir was founded in 2002 because obviously that was at the height of the War on Terror, when people began to see not just the potential for government empowerment through a Surveillance State, but also privatized surveillance, which was and became a massive booming industry. And even for 2002, when people were almost accepting every kind of authoritarian measure offered because they were justified by, “Oh, don't worry. We're just using this to protect terrorists. We're not going to use it against you; your rights aren't endangered by creating an office of Total Information Awareness, as the name suggests, led by Dr. John Poindexter under the auspices of Donald Rumsfeld, that was a bridge too far, even for 2002. 

It was very revealing, however, of the limitless aspirations that the U.S. government had and knew that they could exploit 9/11 to create, essentially telling the American people, “we can’t have any more limits on our ability to collect information about you.” Out of that grew this office called Total Information Awareness that although the office was named in just too much of an Orwellian and creepy way for the American population and the American media to accept, became the ambition of the U.S. government that is what ultimately led to the NSA programs that were designed to collect all information on American citizens without warrants, to file it, to store it, and to be able to analyze it. That became the mindset of not just the U.S. government, but of corporations seeking to become the providers of the technology that would enable it and the vastly lucrative contracts that would come from that. 

It was in that ethos, in that period, seeking to exploit that opportunity that Peter Thiel and Alex Karp created Palantir to become this newly agile, highly sophisticated version of a company that had unprecedented power to collect and store and data mine information about hundreds of millions of people. That is the impetus that gave rise to Palantir, and it continues to this very day to be their primary mission. That primary mission is now being fulfilled, I think, beyond anyone's wildest dreams, given that the Trump administration is empowering them to be the company, the Deep State Surveillance State company, through which all information that the U.S. government maintains about American citizens is run through and stored through and is managed by one company, essentially overseeing the entire information collecting apparatus of the U.S. government. 

I do want to say that Alex Karp, though, in 2020, was depicted as this sort of unlikely, almost apolitical, cryptic figure. Over time, his politics have become remarkably clearer. 

 I just want to comment, too, as well, on this situation that I was personally involved in with Palantir's abuse, because this was quite a long time ago. This was 2012, I believe. But I do think it sheds a lot of light on what Palantir is, what it was even back then, when it still had a fairly good reputation. There were a lot of rumors that WikiLeaks was on the verge of releasing a huge and incriminating file about the Bank of America. One of America's largest banks, I think, maybe its largest commercial bank. The Bank of America was understandably quite alarmed by what was rumored to be an imminent, extremely incriminating release of a secret Bank of America file, the kind that WikiLeaks back then was doing regularly, not just to governments, but to other corporations. In response, Bank of America hired several firms to help it strategize what it should do in response to WikiLeaks' release of it. 

One of the groups hired to help strategize was Palantir, but a group of hackers was able to hack a company called HBGary, also hired, and the documents that were created by Palantir to help Bank of America against this WikiLeaks release were discovered and disclosed. One of the documents that was created with Palantir's cooperation was dated September 3, 2010, which is part of the strategy to help Bank of America against WikiLeaks. 

Here's part of what they said:

So, think about what they were actually saying there. You could choose to continue to pursue the cause you believed in, which was defending WikiLeaks, or you could choose preservation of your professional reputation and professional standing, but you couldn't choose both. They wanted to put people like me in that position, saying, “If you want to keep defending WikiLeaks, we're going to destroy your professional reputation, we're going to find things about you, we're going to leak things about you.” In case any of you think this is sort of the stuff that is the byproduct of paranoia or science fiction scripts about how these kinds of people work, here it is in black and white. 

This was 2010, just about five years after I began writing about politics. I was a little bit surprised, I will admit, by how sinister this is, kind of expressed in corporatist jargon, but it shows what Palantir is. They were saying, “We'll either force him to stop defending WikiLeaks or we'll destroy his career and his professional reputation” by finding out things about him, by leaking things, by launching coordinated campaigns. That was their strategy for discrediting WikiLeaks, for weakening WikiLeaks in defense of and in service to their corporate client that had hired them, which is the Bank of America. 

And then here's a reply from a Palantir person in the reply that says:

Now, this did become public. At the time, Palantir was trying to build this branding of its new corporation, a relatively new corporation still, as sort of a, “Yes, we are contractors to the intelligence agencies. Yes, we work with the CIA and we serve the NSA and the Pentagon. But we're the new version of military and intelligence contractors. We're the ones who care about civil liberties.” And they were trying to recruit the top students from places like Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago by pitching themselves as, yes, we work with these agencies you think are bad, but we're the kind who do it but insist on civil liberties protections. 

Once that document got revealed, and at the time it was very much associated with civil liberties and probably the left, it was embarrassing to them; it was very contradictory to the image they had spent a lot of time building. And so, yes, Alex Karp at the time did call me personally and said, “We deeply apologize for what this document was planning on, it never got to the execution stage, this is contrary to our values. We hope you'll accept our apology.” 

They made the apology public because that was the whole point of it, but I remember, of course, thinking Palantir seems like a very sinister company. How would I not think that? How would anyone not think that when you read that document? And they've only gotten more and more and more embedded into the intelligence apparatus, into the national security state, into the Deep State, to the point where as a result of these executive orders and this attempt to make Palantir essentially omnipresent in our government, they have reached the peak of their power, the kind of fulfillment of that Total Information Awareness program that even back in 2002 was considered too extreme, even though it was just a few months after 9/11. 

Peter Thiel, most of you know him, obviously supported Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. He decided he wouldn't, though he has become, he's very, very close to JD Vance. JD Vance's personal wealth is due to his work with Peter Thiel and Thiel played a major role in financing JD Vance's Senate run in Ohio and also in securing Donald Trump's endorsement for JD Vance and what was a very contested Republican primary, obviously Trump's endorsement in the Republican primary, is essentially dispositive. So, JD Vance owes a lot of his career to his very close allies, to Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Palantir. 

But at this point, Peter Thiel's involvement in Palantir is quite minimal. The person who really runs Palantir is Alex Karp. Despite the fact that he has many billions of dollars and runs this extremely influential and increasingly menacing Deep State entity that is becoming particularly powerful within the Trump administration, very little attention has been paid to him in terms of who he is and what he thinks. But I think with the growing influence of Palantir, the kind of realization of the apex of its aspirations to become the omnipotent provider of government surveillance and the technology that runs it and the data that collects it, he's become very emboldened. He's been speaking a lot more publicly about his belief system, the agenda that he believes in, the ideology he pursues, he's far from some sort of neutral or apolitical technologist. Very much the opposite. He is a hardcore neocon, as devoted a loyalist to Israel as it gets. He very much believes in the virtues and necessity of American war and American power and makes very clear that the goal of Palantir is to serve that and maximize it. 

So, I just want to show you a little bit about Alex Karp, the person who really is the sole controller and manager of Palantir, the company that as we just showed you is now playing such a central role, almost unprecedentedly powerful role in America's Deep State and in its intelligence apparatus and security state. 

Here, from last month, is Alex Karp, who was doing an event at the Ash Carter Exchange. And here's part of what he said: 

Video. Alex Karp, The Ash Carter Exchange. May 7, 2025.

All right, here is Alex Karp speaking on CNBC. I just want to show you what he speaks about, what he prioritizes. Here he is proclaiming antisemitism in the United States, particularly the college protests against Israel, to be one of the greatest problems. And here's a decree that he issued about all of that. 

Video. Alex Karp, CNBC. June 20, 2024.

It would be, I think, sinister enough if somebody just completely apolitical was at the helm of a privatized Surveillance State as expansive and powerful and virtually limitless as Palantir now is. But to have somebody who views protest movements against a foreign government to which he's loyal, Israel, harbor so much contempt and so much hatred for the people who are those protesters. Does it seem like he's inclined to use this surveillance power or this data in very neutral and apolitical ways? Or do you think he's someone who feels so passionately about things like Israel that that information in his hands would almost certainly be weaponized against those who he thinks are advocating an ideology that he regards as evil or dangerous? 

Here from the New York Post, more on Alex Karp:

Peter Thiel, in November 2024 – as I said, he doesn't run the company, but he still is influential within Palantir – he spoke with – you'll never guess who – Bari Weiss, and she asked him about – you will never guess what – Israel. 

Here's what Peter Thiel said about his view of the U.S. and Israel:

Video. Peter Thiel, Bari Weiss, The Free Press. November 14, 2024.

So that's it. We just need to defer to Israel. “Look, we're not always going to be on the same page, but the best thing to do, defer to Israel, have Israel tell us what they want and give it to them. Have Israel tell us what they want us to do and do it. Let's just defer to Israel, and we'll be much better off.”

In late 2023, Palantir announced a policy which you would think would have created a lot of anger and opposition among the American right because it was as pure of an example of what is now called DEI, or job set-asides, as you could possibly imagine and yet people like Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss, both instantly cheered it as soon as it was announced because it's the kind of DEI that they really like. But it also shows you how Palantir thinks as well, which, again, is an important thing to understand, given the power that they've now amassed. Ben Shapiro ultimately kind of backtracked a little bit when his own followers began saying, “What do you mean? How are you cheering for the DEI and job set-asides for specific minority groups when you've been claiming to oppose that your whole life?” 

But here is Palantir's announcement:

They created 180 jobs available, not based on merit, not open to everybody who competes based on merit in the United States, they created 180 jobs available exclusively to Jewish students who claim that they are endangered, exactly the kind of DEI programs where you say Black people have been historically oppressed and feel endangered in society or untreated fairly, therefore we're going to create 80 jobs only for Black people and everyone in the conservative movement or anything adjacent to it goes absolutely crazy, sues over it, says it's illegal, says it is immoral, says its racist. 

And here is Palantir doing exactly the same thing but only for Jewish students, I think indicating the ideology of the people, including Alex Karp, who run this now extremely powerful, centralized corporation that collects and maintains and does whatever it wants with all your personal data from the IRS to HHS to Homeland Security and everything in between. 

Here was Alex Karp quoted in The Hill and Valley Forum, where he was speaking about Israel and the role that Palantir plays in the Israeli attack on Gaza, which is significant. And he was asked basically, what about the role you're playing and the number of civilians being killed? Here's what he said. This was in April 2025. 

Video. Alex Karp, The Hill & Valley Forum. April 30, 2025.

I want to emphasize that, although we've been focused on Palantir's intelligence collection, one of the things they do is they are developing AI products designed to be used on the battlefield. This is actually a story we reported on previously at The Intercept as part of the Stone documents, I worked on it with my colleague Jeremy Scahill, that artificial intelligence or algorithmic analysis was being increasingly used to decide in the Obama administration who would live and who would die with the drone program. So, they would have signed this program would point to people based on who they talked to or in what proximity they were to other people, considered by the program to be bad and if you got enough points, you were deemed eligible for the kill list. These were not human intelligence assets giving information; these were purely algorithmic assessments that ultimately have now become more sophisticated with artificial intelligence, one of the things Palantir is working on. 

And one of the things we were able to discover was that Al Jazeera journalists who interviewed terrorists were not differentiated under this program. A lot of them had very high point totals that made them eligible to be killed, even though they weren't plotting with terrorists; they were interviewing people deemed to be adversaries by the U.S. government. 

That's why I say a lot of this technology is extremely dangerous. Doesn't mean we should ban it, probably other people are developing it, but you need serious safeguards on it to make sure that it's not being abused or pursued for political ends. And here you see somebody who's as loyal to a foreign country and therefore antagonistic to those who criticize that foreign country in the United States as you could possibly imagine, and he's the person amassing this massive power, not just of information but also increasingly of military weaponry. 

Here, he spoke at the Reagan Presidential Foundation in December 2024 and shared some of his philosophy about how the West needs to maintain dominance. 

Video. Alex Karp, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. December 7, 2024.

So, people like Alex Karp are very benevolent, very kind, very loving, very considerate, very fair, but the people who think differently, those are monstrous people; they live without ethics. As a result, we need to make sure that we develop the intel programs and the weaponization programs to keep the people whom we regard as adversaries in fear of us. And it's pure James Bond villain talk, sociopathic talk, which you could dismiss if not for the fact that he really is in a position where he's able to oversee the programs that will actually do that. 

Here's a little bit more of him talking about how he thinks social change of the kind that he wants in the United States should be effected. He's speaking at the Economic Club on May 22, just a little bit ago. And as I said, he's becoming more emboldened in speaking out publicly about just how extremist his ideology is, just how politicized he is after years of kind of hiding and remaining a mysterious figure. Here he is talking about how he wants to effectuate the social change he believes in. 

Video. Alex Karp, The Economic Club of Chicago. May 22, 2025.

So, the way social change happens is that you take the people you disagree with, your enemies, and you humiliate them, and you make them poorer. He was talking before about how if you're against him, if you believe in a cause he doesn't believe in, he thinks that not only you, but your family, and your mistress, all should be revealed and should be punished. They should have their bank accounts taken away. I mean, isn't this the kind of authoritarianism that we have been concerned about, have been objecting to, have been denouncing for so many years, the idea that if you have beliefs that people in power dislike, that you can have private information about you disclosed to humiliate you, that you could have your bank account stripped from you? But dissent can be crushed, and that's what he's saying: we need to make sure that people who dissent live in fear of what we can do to them. This is who Alex Karp is. 

There are people right now in the MAGA movement, people like Laura Loomer and others who are now thinking Palantir is a weapon available to Trump supporters calling on Palantir to be weaponized against the protesters in Los Angeles or other protesters against the Trump administration not surprising that that's the faction that also is very loyal to Israel who sees in Palantir not just an ally, but a weapon. 

But as I said before, one of the dangers always is when a movement comes in and says, we want to curb these abuses that have been used against us, we want to clean out the way these powers are being politicized. The big danger often is that those who get the power will seek instead to seize those powers for themselves and further fortify them. I do believe there are people inside the Trump administration whose vision is very antithetical to that, including people like Tulsi Gabbard, but this has a momentum. This is very powerful people behind it that want Palantir to ascend to this position for all sorts of reasons that they believe serve their agenda and we're well on our way to that happening. 

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Glenn Greenwald is away this week. I'm Aaron Maté. 

Tonight, a look at two global crises where the U.S. is deeply involved. From Ukraine to Gaza, are we any closer to peace? For insight on the Ukraine-Russia question, we'll be joined by authors and scholars Jonathan Haslam and Nicolai Petro, and to discuss the latest in Israel-Palestine, we'll hear from Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. 

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

Glenn Greenwald is away this week. 

I’m Briahna Joy Gray, the guest host for this episode. 

You might know me from my own podcast, “Bad Faith,” or from my previous hosting responsibilities over at The Hill’s “Rising,” less of a free speech platform than this one. 

Today, I'll be walking through the implosion of the Democratic Party, the pathetic hunt for a Joe Rogan of the left, the party's instinct for corporate self-preservation over real populist reform and the media cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. 

Afterward, I'll be joined by independent left podcaster and co-host of “Useful Idiots” podcast, Katie Halper, to continue the conversation about how the DNC is continuing to try to rig elections in favor of incumbents, even as they repeatedly keep dying in office, and the likelihood that there might be more independent third-party runs in 2028, a la RFK Jr.'s 2024 attempt. Now, let's get right into it. 

For a decade now, corporate Democrats have been warning that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republic. During Trump's first term, much of that handwriting seemed to be hyperbolic – Trump derangement syndrome, if you will. His big legislative accomplishment was in line with the policy priorities of your typical establishment Republican: a $1.7 trillion tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich.

There was some good stuff too: unlike Biden, he didn't start any new wars. While he continued to fund Israel's genocide in Gaza and crack down on free speech rights of Americans who protested the said genocide, Trump did accomplish the temporary cease-fire that AOC merely claimed Kamala was “working tirelessly” to achieve. 

But now that President Trump is finally following through on some of his less popular and less populist policy commitments, like the Medicaid cuts, included in his Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House last week, or throwing markets into disarray with his erratic application of tariffs, which can be good policy.

Establishment Democrats seem almost happy to have something to justify their hatred of Trump. So, you see, the less populist Trump behaves, the more it disguises the Democrats' own failure to meet the needs of the people. Some Democrats are outright advising that the way they should respond to this alleged “existential crisis” is to simply do nothing: Just sit back and wait to benefit from the backlash. 

You don't have to take my word for it: Listen to a veteran DNC advisor, James Carville, describe the strategy: 

Video. James Carville, The View. February 18, 2025.

Fiddle while Rome burns, the expert says, then exploit the tragedy. 

But so far, the backlash isn't coming. A new Economist/YouGov poll, out yesterday, shows that while GOP favorability is low, at negative 11%, Democrats are doing even worse, at negative 21%; 41% of Americans still view Republicans favorably, while a mere 36% of Americans view Democrats favorably. 

These polls come as no surprise to those of us who consume independent media. I mean, just look around: Democrats are in the throes of a credibility crisis that arose out of Joe Biden's obvious unfitness to run for president. 

They're trying to distract from their complicity and the cover-up, but going all in on the idea that it was Biden himself, his family, and his closest advisors that hid his decline from the party and the public until it was too late, not the liberal media. But it's hard to call Biden's infirmary a “cover-up” when it was out in the public for all of us to see and comment on. The president was confusing Haifa and Rafah, mixing up the president of Egypt and the president of Mexico, and even dodged culpability in the classified documents case on the basis that he didn't have the mental competence to knowingly take the files. 

He even seemed to wander off at the G7 Conference a year ago, like a distracted child. 

Video. Joe Biden, The Economic Times. June 14, 2024.

His mental lapses were evident as far back as the 2020 primary, during which presidential candidates Julian Castro and Cory Booker had the temerity to call him out for not remembering what he had just said at the primary debate. This clip is from way back in 2019, when Dems still could have avoided the albatross of a historically old and declining candidate around their necks. What did they do instead? Disappear both Castro and Booker, once rising stars from the ranks of up-and-coming leadership. 

Video. Cory Booker, CNN. September 13, 2019.

You heard it there. The mainstream media accused anyone who noticed Biden's obvious decline of being motivated by Trump-like conservative politics. “Believe our Trump derangement syndrome, not your lying eyes,” they seem to say. 

Reuters reported the story about Biden wandering off at the G7 as “lacking context.” Meanwhile, his inability to finish sentences was “contextualized” as a mere stutter. 

Jake Tapper, one of the authors of the book “Original Sin,” which sheds light on the extent of Biden's mental infirmity, was himself one of the original apologists for Biden's cognitive decline. A few good mainstream pundits on MSNBC question the co-author on Tapper's own complicity. 

Video. Alex Thompson, MSNBC, May 26, 2025.

That was some good questioning. And I got to say, I don't think we need medical degrees to be able to accurately observe what was going on with Joe Biden. We didn't need this new book to know the truth either. Independent media, along with the voters, knew what was been going on for years. 

Biden's midterm rating was worse than any other elected president on record and, back in August 2023, polls show that 77% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, thought Biden was too old to be president. But Democrats wouldn't listen. Or rather, they simply didn't care. 

Now, as part of the media's effort to whitewash its own complicity, the same media figures who were involved in the cover-up are claiming, well, they had to defend Biden's mental competency because no one else primaried him. They were stuck with him as a candidate. This, even as the party shut down the possibility of a primary from the jump. 

Contrast former DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, making that incredible claim that anyone could have primaried Biden if they wanted to, followed by Biden/Harris spokesperson turned MSNBC “journalist,” Symone Sanders, proclaiming that under no circumstances will there be a primary. 

Video. Jaime Harrisson, Symone Sander, MSNBC. 

“If folks wanted to primary Joe Biden, there was nobody to tell them that they couldn't?” Is he serious? The mendacity is frankly shocking. As Symone admitted, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson did throw their hats in the ring, as said RFK Jr., and you can hear how much respect they got for doing so reflected in Symone's smite tone and her inability to pronounce Marianne's name. Then don't forget, RFK Jr. also ran as a Democrat before the party pushed about and it's no surprise why he left the Dems.

 The Democratic Party, its pundits and politicians, were simply all behind Joe Biden, no matter how ill-fated his electoral chances were from the get-go. And while they want to memory hole their role in setting Dems up to fail, I have the receipts. 

Take “Pod Save America,” one of the most popular liberal podcasts in the country. These former Obama speech writers turned media moguls finally admitted that Biden wasn't fit to lead after Biden's disastrous debate with Trump. But the hindsight is 2020. Listen to how hostile they were in conversation with moderate primary candidate, Democrat Dean Phillips, when he joined their show during the primary season that wasn't. 

Video. Phillips, Pod Save America. November 20, 2023.

Phillips and I do not share the same politics, but he was right. At a certain point, internal polls show that Biden could not win. According to “Original Sin,” the Jake Tapper book, Biden traded trails rather in every battleground state, and the race that tightened in states he won comfortably back in 2020. But the voters don't matter, the polls don't matter, not to Democrats. What matters to the Democratic Party elites is who they choose to top the ticket. 

As Bernie Sanders’s former national press secretary in 2020, I know this all too well. In two back-to-back election cycles, the Democratic Party ignored polls that showed Bernie was more electable than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden against Donald Trump. 

Now, this is not some Monday morning quarterbacking from a disgruntled leftist. Democratic Party insider Donna Brazile admitted the primary was rigged back in 2017.

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson admit as much in “Original Sin.”  They admit it! The election was rigged. But even with all of the faux mea culpas happening around Biden's lack of mental fitness, the Democrats STILL refuse to act any differently going forward, to learn a lesson from their past mistakes. Tapper and Thompson write that Bernie was perceived to be unable to attract Black voters, but Bernie was the only candidate in 2020 who matched Biden's popularity with that group, while also outstripping the field when it came to Latino voters. 

Bernie remains popular. Not only have he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez been turning out tens of thousands of voters across the country during their anti-oligarchy tour, including in deep red states. Bernie's recent appearance on the “Flagrant” podcast, with Andrew Schultz, had a whole room of popular podcast “Bros” clamoring for the exact “democratic socialism” establishment Dems insisted would turn off the public!

Everybody's saying it. Look, it seems obvious that left populism is the way for Democrats to push back against Trump's right populism, which unfortunately, is increasingly informed by the tech billionaires that fund his campaign rather than the working-class real populists who voted him into office. You've got to ask yourself, is pardoning reality TV stars convicted of tax fraud really improving your ability to support your family? 

What about growing the military budget (and the deficit) at the same time while cutting special education funding? 

What about shifting wealth from the bottom 60% of working-age households to the top income brackets? 

Look, no matter what your politics are, two parties that are competing for the support of working-class Americans instead of aligning with corrupt billionaires would be a good thing! But you can't convince someone of something they're paid not to understand. Which is why Democrats are, instead of embracing popular policies like Medicare for all or a tax on billionaires, are choosing to spend millions of dollars to figure out how to, get this, speak to American men. I really wish I were kidding here.

You really can't make this stuff up. Dems are obsessed with finding the Joe Rogan of the left, but they could not be barking up a wronger tree. 

Hilariously, they seem to be tapping one of their most insidious surrogates, Oliva Juliana, to “message better” on men while continuing to treat Sanders – the man who was literally endorsed by the actual Joe Rogan back in 2020 – as a pariah. 

Video. James Carville, The Daily Beast. May 2025.

To be clear, Carville hasn't won an election since Bill Clinton in the ‘90s, but I digress. 

The reason why Democrats’ mission to find their own Joe Rogan will fail is obvious: to be a credible interlocutor in the political space, you have to be willing to say the true thing when it's hard, even when it is critical of your party. Especially when it's critical of your party. The popular “Manosphere” podcaster, Andrew Schultz, gets it. 

Video. Andrew Schultz, Flagrant.  May 28, 2025.

Even on MSNBC, a guest of Ayman's show was also able to identify the core issue here. 

Video. Ayman Mohyeldin, MSNBC. May 24, 2025.

See, right there at the end is a great summary of the impossibility of what Democrats think they're going to achieve. “We need an authentic voice that's going to become popular organically, and we need to control them.” 

Good luck with that, Democrats. Good luck with that. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Back with Katie Halper. You know her from the “Katie Halper” podcast and as co-host of “Useful Idiots” with Aaron Maté. Welcome to System Update. 

Katie Halper: Thanks, Brie. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Katie, it's a pleasure. I can't wait to pick your brain about some of the viral clips, especially from the sort of Manosphere podcast arena that have gone viral precisely because of how well Bernie Sanders himself and his ideas have translated into his sphere, that Democrats have insisted were so right-wing and so far gone, and they spent so many years vilifying but now seem to be trying to enter into those kinds of spaces. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: I think it's funny because, of course, Bri, not to be self-promoting, but they're searching for the – what is it? – left-wing Joe Rogan. What about Briahna Joy Gray and Katie Halper to take the mantle? 

It is ironic that the same people who were throwing Bernie under the bus, smearing him, attacking him, are now saying that he has some kind of messaging that's good for the democrats. There's always this obsession with messaging over content and program, but that's kind of another issue. 

I think people continue to smear Bernie Sanders but to the extent that they are praising him, they're praising him now because they know he's not going to run. So, I think they think it's safe for them to praise his ideas because they actually are either just paying lip service to it or they are afraid of Bernie's more progressive stances that challenge the status quo. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I think that really gets to the core of the issue that the Democratic Party for years has managed to try to frame themselves as somehow different than the establishment wing of the Republican Party, despite having, substantively, the same corporate donors by leaning and going all in on identity politics.

There's been a backlash against that. They're saying, okay, well, now we've got to find some other messaging prong when the whole reason why they went all in on identity politics and now we're going all in this idea that they just get the right man who's lift enough weights to say the right thing that they will also be able to compete, it's because they're allergic, their corporate base makes them allergic to actually advancing the kind of ideas that made Bernie popular in the first place acting like this guy was somehow a ball of charisma as much as I liked his sort of like a grumpy straightforward persona. He wasn't winning hearts and minds because he was a charm generator. It was because, as Joe Rogan himself said when he was endorsing Bernie Sanders back in 2020, he's a man who's been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and he has credibility. He's trustworthy. And it's amazing to rewatch that endorsement now that the Democrats are in the middle of this incredible credibility crisis. 

I want to ask you specifically about this book, “Original Sin,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I don't know if you had seen that clip before, that super cut that Ayman put together on MSNBC of Jake Tapper doing exactly what is sort of criticized in this book, although I will say this book stays away mostly from media criticism and focuses on the idea that it was Biden in his inner circle that knew the truth and were just lying to everybody else and everybody else was sort of deceived by them, including the liberal media. What do you make of that sort of framing there? Is Jake Tapper really innocent in all of this? 

Katie Halper: I mean, I joke that Jake Tapper was well-positioned to write a book about a cover-up because he participated in the cover-up. So, he does probably have some inside knowledge and real insight into it. But no, I mean, you alluded to this and the mashup that I'm in proves this. Jake Tapper was doing the exact kind of cover-up and running of interference that you and I have commented on the media doing for Joe Biden, for the DNC, for centrist Democrats, that we know that they do, they love to do. And so, it is rich seeing someone who participated in that cover-up profiting off of a book about a cover-up and he's hawking that product on his shows and on the various CNN shows that he appears on and all the appearances he's been doing. And I think at the end, once again, it's fine for people to have the eureka moments in hindsight. Somehow, it never happens in real time. And he keeps making these media appearances and talking about how he has a great humility, and his co-writer talks about the humility, which is, I guess, as close as to a mea culpa that we'll get, but that's not, I'm always so frustrated when people say humility like they always do these humble brags. I'm truly humbled by, insert whatever praise, so that's just a little pet peeve I have with that word. 

But, yeah, I think that Jake Tapper, like much of the media, keeps making the same mistakes. They're warmongers for every war. I mean, the cover-up, is disgusting but another disgusting thing is that he has spread so many lies about Palestinians and has run so much interference, much like he ran so much interference for the Biden campaign, he's running so much interference for IDF and he and Dana Bash have done such a disgusting job at vilifying Palestinians, Palestinian Americans like Rashida Tlaib, but all Palestinians, and taking every single rumor and fabricating a narrative and running with it and never correcting it. 

Tapper and Dana Bash pushed the mass rape Hamas narrative that has been totally debunked; they've never corrected it and, at the same time, they've ever once acknowledged the fact that there's video footage of Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian,  – what I would call hostage, what our media calls prisoner or detainee, but I think, to be consistent we should say hostage – and it's one thing to push a debunked narrative and never correct it, but at least acknowledge the fact that we do know of people who are raped by Israelis, but the fact they don't acknowledge that and that this is something that mainstream Israeli media covers shows that they really don't care about sexual violence. They don't about rape and they're happy to be doing PR for a genocidal state. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, I think it's a really…

Katie Halper: Sorry, we're talking about cover-ups, but they're related. 

Briahna Joy Gray: No, I think that's a really important point because there is something deeply ironic and dissonant about Jake Tapper in particular. I don't know that Alex Thompson and it could be similarly described as hypocritical, but Jake Tapper for sure, go doing the press rounds about a cover-up while still actively participating in a misinformation campaign, at least as significant as the lies about the Steele dossier or claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was misinformation. I mean, someone else had another super cut sort of juxtaposing what he's saying now about Hunter Biden with what he said back then about Hunter Biden and framing any and every criticism of Joe Biden or just observation from people who actually love Joe Biden, that doesn't seem to be up to his best, he's not the same Joe Biden who was vice president back in 2008/2012 cycles, as somehow being Trumpy as though supporting Donald Trump, even if that were your perspective, precludes you from seeing the truth with your own eyes. And Katie, this is what's so frustrating about Democrats, and frankly, my concern with some folks on the left who seem to be taking this sort of measured praise for the enthusiasm Bernie and AOC are capturing on these anti-oligarchy tours and predicting that there's going to be real change to the Democratic Party this time, how optimistic are you that we're likely to see the Democrats learning from the lessons of the past? And if not, why aren't you optimistic? 

Katie Halper: Right. Yeah, I mean, I think that, unfortunately, the Democrats would really rather lose to Trump than have someone like Bernie in power. But you're asking a slightly different question, right? You're kind of saying, well, what suggests that the Democrats will deliver anything, even with this good messaging that Bernie and AOC are bringing? And certainly, they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to Gaza, but, sure, on economic issues, Bernie, especially, is excellent. 

I think that the problem is, and you've spoken a lot about this, Bri, it's great to have fresh ideas, fresh policies, fresh but also consistent. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, Bernie's been saying the same thing for decades and that is something that I think has endears him justifiably to lots of people. But the question is, will the Democratic Party actually allow for any of these policies to take hold? [audio problems]

So, there's a lot of rotating villain phenomenon, right? 

So, I think that the Democrats really love to pretend that they can't get things done, that they'd love to get things done. But the truth is they just don't want to get them done. They don't want to see these things because they're as beholden to their donors as the Republicans are, they're just better on social issues often. And to the extent that they're better on social issues, they certainly are willing to sacrifice these social issues in the name of fundraising, which is why, for instance, neither Obama nor Biden codified Roe v. Wade. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up Roe v. Wade because I have more optimistic folks, left side of the aisle saying, “Oh, no, this didn't waste strategy, whatever you think of it, it's likely to work” because look at how well Joe Biden did in midterms.” And I think in retrospect, and I think some of us at the time reported that we suspected that there was not a red wave in 2022, it was not a signal that voters were actually secretly happy with Joe Biden. Polls at the time showed, as I said in my radar, that he had historically low favorability at that time. What people were coming out to vote for was not Joe Biden; it was for Roe v. Wade. It was to express their discontent with Roe being overturned and anti-abortion laws being put into effect in all the country. And a lot of red states like Kansas, bipartisan majorities came out to defend those kinds of formerly constitutional rights. 

I want to ask you, though, about this particular clip where Chuck Todd, even someone who is very much an establishment pundit, seems to think and maybe even seems to hope that there will, unlike 2024, when the Democrats completely shut down a primary, that there will not just be a primary, but that there'll be independent third-party style candidates, a la RFK Jr., running in that race. Let's take a look. 

Video. Chuck Todd, The Chuck Toddcast. May 27, 2025.

Briahna Joy Gray: I don't even know where to start with that, Katie. Why a military guy? Why this Bill McRaven person, who apparently is the former chancellor of the University of Texas system? And why the optimism that we're going to have someone operating outside of the two-party system, from this person who is very much an establishment pundit? 

Katie Halper: Right. And who really, I think, took part in a mocking of third-party candidates that so much of the corporate media took part in. I think that it's interesting you asked about why it has to be a military figure. And I think this speaks to how much the media and our political elites are so obsessed with optics and messaging and so inattentive to substance. So, it's not about what this person's going to offer. It's not about the changes that they're going to bring to people's lives in any qualitative or meaningful way. It's about whether they can tap into people's, I don't know, like, crushes on military figures or tap into our militaristic society. It does have a bizarre obsession, I think, with optics that, again, I think is because no one who is powerful, no political or media elites actually want to see real changes. So, they just want to have kind of like different presentations that get people excited, but nobody wants to see the actual changes happen. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yes. It’s a different kind of identity politics. It's the same thing as, like, yeah, like the Joe Rogan of the left thing. It's like they think that they can find a podcaster who lifts enough weights. I guess that's why we're just disqualified Katie. We're not, we don't lift heavy… 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I know. I do a lot of repetition of light weights, right? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Right. It's totally vibe-based. 

Now look, of course, there is a, like a substantive claim for having a veteran, but I think it also misses the mainstream pundits' missing how much we are in a sort of anti-interventionist/isolationist/anti-war moment in both parties. And that's exactly why someone like Trump, who definitely ran as an anti-interventionist and didn't start any new wars, at least in his first term, was so popular. So them saying a military guy, I mean, I think someone like Matthew Ho, who ran on the Green Party for a Senate in North Carolina some years back, could be exactly that kind of guy because he served and learned from his service exactly why we shouldn't be sending troops to fight pointless wars and ruining lives all because young kids see no other avenue to access things like healthcare and a quality education. That could be your guide, but we know Chuck Todd isn't going to throw his hat in behind a Green Party leftist, kind of Bernie-style candidate like Matthew Ho. 

Katie Halper: Right. I mean, I think you're right that it would be great to have a military figure who was anti-war. I mean those are extremely powerful voices and they have a lot of credibility and, of course, more importantly they're anti-war which is something that wins votes, but also is obviously good for the planet and good for all people on the planet, except for people who work in the arms industry and people who support genocide. 

But I think that it is interesting to see people again, the very same people, who, I mean, I think it was Chuck Todd who said Bernie Sanders would get “hammered and sickled,” he actually said that to him, see them act poetic about working outside of the duopoly. They acknowledge that the two-party system doesn't work, but what were they doing except for running interference for this two-party system? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, absolutely. And just as the final nail in the coffin, which is perhaps a metaphor, now that I said it out loud, that's in poor taste. If we pull up the graphic, a significant number of Democrats who have quite literally died in office, a margin that would have prevented the Democrats or enabled the Democrats to block the passage of Biden's big, beautiful budget bill in the House had they stayed alive. 

Now, remember, DNC vice chair David Hogg got an enormous amount of pushback simply saying you wanted to start a pack that funded challengers to incumbents, observing accurately that younger members of the party like AOC and people who are outsiders like Bernie Sanders are the ones that have managed to capture whatever energy is left in the husk of the Democrat Party. And for that, Democrat elites have rallied the ranks to literally push him out of his position at the DNC and are frankly using sort of identity politics as a lever to get him out. Even as Democrats are unable to whip sufficient votes to block win priorities, precisely because their members are so old and enfeebled that they are quite literally dying in office. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I mean, of course, the final nail in the coffin was the perfect turn of phrase. But what better represents the narcissism and selfishness and moribund nature of the Democrats than the way that they are refusing to resign? Because, again, the Democrats are constantly fearmongering – and I want to be clear, I mean, Trump is something to be feared. I mean, he's not an anti-war candidate. He is terrible for many reasons.  The Democrats often criticize him for the things that aren't even that bad, which is another irony. But they say he's an existential threat, he's a fascist and yet if they're so worried about this, why don't they retire so that they have a better chance of having someone from the Democratic Party who can vote against his bill? I mean literally, his bill passed because Democrats refused to resign despite having been very sick or old. It reminds me also of the way that if Kamala Harris cared so much about defeating Trump, if this was the most important election ever, then why didn't she listen to the base, which was clamoring for her to depart from Biden on several issues and most notably on Gaza. We know now from someone who worked with her, it was because she didn't want to be rude, and it's not, it's gauche to depart from your president's policies when you're the running mate. 

We also know that Joe Biden said, I don't want any daylight between us, kid. And so, for Biden, his legacy, much like these Democrats who are dying in office, their legacies are more important than defeating Trump and Trumpism or helping the people that they claim to serve. For Kamala, I guess, ruffling feathers was more important– or not upsetting donors, or not being able to run around with Liz Cheney, or not incurring the wrath of AIPAC. So, it just belies the whole claim that this is something that is an existential threat. 

I think that I mean we are facing existential threats. We're facing existential threats that neither party is willing to deal with, especially when it comes to climate change. But it's very hard to convince people that you're taking this seriously as an existential threat when you don't do the minimal things needed to either win an election or prevent a Republican from taking your seat in the case of people who are not resigning. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it's really hard, frankly, to see in concurrent election cycles the voting population stand up and clearly, clearly be clamoring for a legitimate, sincere populism. I mean, the outrage around inflation, cost of living, housing prices, gas prices, food prices, education prices. These are the sectors that are driving inflation and which are causing life to be so precarious for so many Americans and it's nice now that Democrats are like acknowledging that economic precarity, economic anxiety is a real thing because for I don't know like eight years after the 2015-2016 cycle they acted if you said well yeah people voted for Trump because of economic anxiety they said that oh that's just racism that's just a synonym for racism we won't take that argument so now they're finally embracing it and trying to say we're going to do a Joe Rogan sort of a situation. But again, they're not backing any of those policies. You're still getting Democrats out here arguing against baseline things like raising the minimum wage, which hasn't been raised since Bush was in office. The longest period without a minimum wage raise since it was invented in like the 1930s.

And meanwhile, Americans are struggling. So this huge lane is opening up. Meanwhile, on the right side of the aisle, I think people who voted for Donald Trump in good faith hoping that he was going to follow the sort of banded wing of his party and do real economic populism are seeing that Bannon is engaged in a battle with the other wing of the party that frankly bought the election, the tech wing, the Elon Musk's, the Marc Andreessen's, the folks who are very openly saying, “We need to do AI, we need to put the public out of business, we're going to make all of these arguments that legitimize defunding the welfare state that so many Americans, including so many American in very low-income red states in the South and elsewhere, are relying upon to survive.”

And we can do that because we literally bought this election. And I'm afraid that that tech wing, the billionaire wing, who has no alignment and interest with the working-class in this country, most of whom are frankly not even American or relatively recent transplants are going to win out and it's going to be too late for a genuine populism to actually restore a democracy that reflects people's values. What do you think? 

Katie Halper: I think it's a justifiable fear. And I think what you're saying it really does ring true. Again, we've seen in the cases of the leadership of both parties, we have seen a real embrace of anti-populism, right? And one of the most frustrating things was to see people equate Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump because there's a big difference between actual populism and pseudo populism, just like there's a big difference between being anti-war and being pseudo-anti-war. And Trump is great at appealing to populist sentiments. But of course, he's not someone who cares about the working class, the middle class. He is someone who, in some ways, is more dangerous than traditional Republicans because he talks a good talk. He knows how to sound like he's a populist. He knows how to sound like he's against the status quo. But of course, in some ways, the most dangerous thing to have is someone who substantively is status quo, but performatively and stylistically is not. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it is interesting to see float things like, we’re going to do a tax on the rich, right? But then walk it back. And you can read that in a couple of different ways. You can say Donald Trump is just a bad faith actor. He never met in the first place, or you can write it as, well, he actually is the one who's got a good sense of what the wind is blowing and what the base wants. And maybe he would be happy to do a little bit. He's a billionaire himself.  I wouldn't take it too far that he was willing, would be willing to do too redistributive justice to return the hard working, increased productivity of the working-classes back into their pockets the way that it was 50 years ago or so before a bunch of laws redistributed it to the very top, including Trump's own 2017 tax cuts. I won't take it too far, but there's a way you could read it that says, well, maybe Trump did get a sense that you need bread and roses. You need to get the masses a little bit to keep them on your team and that the corporate interests within his own party won't even let him do the bare minimum. And so, it's not clear to me how much there is a real war between the Steve Bannon's who seem to be more genuinely committed to working-class politics, even if it's also mixed in with sort of a nativism and some other unsavory aspects that I personally don't agree with. And this is like the raw, open, we don't need workers anymore. We're going to do AI, we're going to feed you cricket slop and you're going to like it, we don't even need humanity, we're to be on the moon types. And like my concern, I don't know how to read it, but if I had to pick, I would much rather the Steve Bannon's – I can't believe I'm saying this, but I would rather the Steve Bannon’s wing of the Republican Party went out. The problem is the Steve Banning wing of the Republican Party didn't spend half a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. 

Katie Halper: Right. And I think he also doesn't appeal to certain segments, demographically speaking, who are very powerful. I mean, again, I think that it is kind of a funny thing to say, I hope that Steve Bannon wins. But of course, I do think that populists, you can work across the aisle with economic populists on certain issues, whereas there's nothing you can work with Elon Musk types about, right? They are scarier in many ways, and their policies are scarier, and there's very little overlap between the populist left and the populist right, to the extent that you can even have a populist right. But yeah, certainly I think that the Elon Musk wing is more frightening than the, I mean, they're both frightening, but yeah, I guess if. I mean, Bri, you're not someone who likes the lesser of two evils, but maybe that's the furthest I can say is that Steve Bannon is the lesser of two evils when it comes to the Bannon wing or the Elon Musk wing. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Amen to that. I can't disagree, Katie. I really appreciate your willingness to talk through some of this with me. This was cathartic for me because watching all of this happen in real time has been difficult. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you, talk about it here on Glenn's amazing platform, and to continue to follow the Democrats' self-destruction cycle and incredible cope over their complicity and the great Biden cover-up. Thank you, Katie.

Katie Halper: Thank you, Thanks, Bri. Thanks Glenn.