“I have always said that they are the same person. And the drama of this story is that one ends up dead in the darkest prison in America, and the other in the White House.” — Michael Wolff



A few days ago we had Jason Pack on the show suggesting that the Anglo-American media elite had a degree of complicity in the Epstein scandal. Michael Wolff [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wolff_(journalist)] disagrees. The media weren’t complicit, he says. They were just dumb. They found the story unseemly, were uncomfortable with it, and avoided it out of disdain—not conspiracy. David Remnick of The New Yorker was “dismissive of the whole thing.” The word Wolff keeps coming back to is “ick.”

Wolff knew Epstein. He recorded an estimated hundred hours of interviews with him. He has tried repeatedly to sell an Epstein book. Every publisher passed—the last time as recently as autumn 2025. One cited “the ick factor.” Others feared a Trump lawsuit. The man who made fortunes for publishers with Fire and Fury [https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Fury-Inside-Trump-White/dp/1250158060] couldn’t get a deal on the story he knows best. If you want the closest thing to a firsthand account, Wolff says, read “The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein” in his collection Too Famous [https://www.amazon.com/Too-Famous-Powerful-Wishful-Notorious/dp/125014762X]. He’s probably right.

What emerges from the conversation is a portrait of Epstein as a middleman in a city of middlemen—but one who was genuinely interested in the people he connected, which is rare in that world. His sexual depravity was at war with his ambition to be respectable. The blackmail theory? “Certainly not true,” Wolff says. People came because they liked being there. He was their friend. And then there’s Trump. Wolff’s most explosive claim is that they are the same person—the closest relationship both men had in life was with each other. The drama is that one ends up dead in the darkest prison in America and the other in the White House. It’s Gatsby without the romance. And that’s what makes them both so vile.

As for the Trump show, Wolff has given up predicting its end. It doesn’t end until Trump dies. He is sui generis—nobody will replace him. He doesn’t understand legacy, doesn’t care about it, and when it’s no longer about him, could give a fuck. We’ll be trying to figure out how this happened for the next hundred years.

 

Five Takeaways



•       The Media Didn’t Conspire—They Were Just Dumb: Wolff dismisses the idea that the Anglo-American media elite knew more about Epstein than they were letting on. They didn’t know anything, he says. They found the story unseemly, were uncomfortable with it, and avoided it out of disdain—not conspiracy. David Remnick of The New Yorker was “dismissive of the whole thing.”

•       No Publisher Would Touch the Epstein Book: Wolff has tried repeatedly to sell an Epstein book. Every publisher passed. One cited “the ick factor.” Others feared a Trump lawsuit. The last attempt was autumn 2025. The man who made fortunes publishing Fire and Fury couldn’t get a deal on the story he knows best. The publishing industry’s failure of nerve, Wolff says, is total.

•       Trump and Epstein Are the Same Person: Wolff’s most explosive claim: Trump and Epstein are the same person. The closest relationship both men had in life was with each other. The drama of the story is that one ends up dead in the darkest prison in America and the other in the White House. Gatsby without the romance.

•       Epstein Was a Middleman in a City of Middlemen: What made Epstein different wasn’t the blackmail—Wolff says that’s “certainly not true.” People came because they liked being there. Epstein was genuinely interested in the people he connected, which is rare am

Gatsby Without the Romance: Michael Wolff on Why Trump and Epstein Are the Same Person

“The fatal error is ours. Legislators set out a regulatory regime that keeps regulation at bay. The only other industry with a similar protection is the gun industry.” — Olivier Sylvain



There are certain words in book titles that provoke. “Reclaiming”, for example. My guest today is happy to defend the provocation. Fordham law professor and former FTC senior advisor Olivier Sylvain argues in his new book, Reclaiming the Internet, that the internet was never really ours to begin with—and that the story about user control, free speech, and digital democratisation was always more nostalgia than reality.

But Sylvain’s argument in Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control—and How We Can Take It Back [https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Internet-Tech-Took-Control_and/dp/1967190127] is not the usual big-tech-is-bad narrative (yawn). He doesn’t blame the companies. He blames us—or rather, Congress. The fatal error, he says, was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, which created a blanket immunity from liability for companies trafficking in user-generated content. The only other industry with comparable legal protection, he says, is the gun industry. That immunity enabled the attention economy’s business model. Infinite scrolling = infinite advertising = infinite profit.

What follows from that error is now everywhere: autoplay, algorithmic recommendation—design features engineered to hold your attention, not to facilitate free speech. Sylvain insists these companies aren’t really platforms. They are, instead, services delivering content pursuant to their bottom line. And now the same Nineties playbook—innovation, user control, free speech—is being replayed with AI. Companies are deploying chatbots before they’re ready, racing each other to market. A young man killed himself after a Gemini chatbot told him to and Google invoked the First Amendment in its defence.

The fix, Sylvain argues, is not to abolish Section 230 but to attend to the business model itself: data minimisation, purpose limitations, and the kind of product-safety regulation that every other industry—from automobiles to toys to food—already accepts. I should disclose that my wife runs litigation at Google, so I’m all too familiar with the counter argument. But Sylvain makes a persuasive case even if his reclamation project is still a little too Rousseauean for my Hobbesian taste.

 

Five Takeaways



•       The Fatal Error Was Ours, Not Theirs: Sylvain doesn’t blame big tech. He blames us—or rather, Congress. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act created a blanket immunity from liability for user-generated content. The only other industry with comparable protection is the gun industry. That legal shield became the business model.

•       These Are Not Platforms: The word “platform” implies a neutral conduit connecting users. Sylvain says that’s wrong. These are companies engineering your experience—infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendation—to hold your attention and serve their bottom line. The free speech story is cover for a commercial design.

•       The Same Mistake Is Happening with AI: The nineties playbook—innovation, user control, free speech—is being replayed with AI. Companies are deploying chatbots before they’re ready, racing each other to market. Internal documents show they knew the dangers. A young man committed suicide after Gemini told him to. Google invoked the First Amendment in its defence.

•       Data Protection Is the Real Fix: Sylvain argues for data minimisation and purpose limitations—rules that would only allow companies to collect information consistent with the purposes a consumer signed up for. Not to monetise it for opaque reasons. That would dampen the incentive to engineer addiction without

How to Reclaim the Internet: Olivier Sylvain on Platforms and Policy

“They’re both naughty boys in the playground, leveraging the absence of clarity to their own advantage. Neither one of them is an authoritative leader of opinion with the interests of everyone at heart.” — Keith Teare



What a difference a week makes. Last Saturday, Keith Teare [https://thatwastheweek.substack.com/] was arguing that Anthropic was wrong to push back against the US government’s use of AI in warfare. This week his editorial is entitled “No Good Guys [https://thatwastheweek.substack.com/].” He’s used AI to put images of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Pete Hegseth around the same table—and found all three guilty of poor leadership. According to Keith, Amodei is “ideologically” (whatever that means) driven. Altman is commercially driven and Hegseth is just following orders. None of them is asking the all-important questions about AI policy. And the man who should be—Trump’s AI czar David Sacks—is absent-without-leave. All four should be court martialed.

Yes, a lot has happened in seven days. Altman publicly supported Amodei’s position on surveillance and autonomous weapons—then pulled a classic Sam u-turn and signed a contract with the Department of War. Amodei’s internal memo was leaked to The Information [https://www.theinformation.com/], revealing that he’d interpreted the government’s “no unlawful use” language as meaning there is no law. And the US military used Claude in the Iran war anyway. As Keith puts it: they’re all naughty boys in the playground, leveraging the gaps to their own self-advantage.

The only problem, of course, is that this isn’t a playground game. And that these men are all shaping the lives (and deaths) of countless people around the world.

Meanwhile, Om Malik’s “Post of the Week” [https://om.co/] offers a devastating contrast between Xi’s China and Trump’s America. China, Om argues, has published a five-year AI plan built on open-source software and bottom-up adoption. America, in contrast, has AI theater. No strategy, no policy, no leadership—just contracts, leaks, and perpetual spin. Then there’s the Startup of the Week, Jobright, which hit $5 million in annual revenue with nine people, suggesting that the companies of the future may not need humans at all. Keith’s own SignalRank [https://signalrank.ai/] has four people and claims to be going public. We seem to be heading for post-human companies before we’ve figured out who’s managing the humans.

Maybe we should court martial everyone. What a difference a week makes.

 

Five Takeaways



•       No Good Guys: Keith Teare’s editorial puts Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Pete Hegseth in the same room—and finds all three guilty of bad leadership. Amodei is ideologically driven, Altman is commercially driven, and Hegseth is just doing his job. None of them is asking the big questions about AI policy. The real culprit may be the invisible AI czar, David Sacks.

•       Altman Said One Thing, Then Did Another: Last week Altman publicly supported Amodei’s position on surveillance and autonomous weapons. This week he signed a contract with the Department of War. The contract uses “no unlawful use” language—which, as Amodei’s leaked memo points out, effectively means there is no law.

•       The US Used Claude in Iran Anyway: Despite the very public dispute between Anthropic and the government, the US military used Claude in the Iran operation. The government doesn’t need your permission to use your product. It just needs an API key and a credit card.

•       China Has a Plan. America Has Theater: Om Malik’s “Post of the Week” contrasts China’s published five-year AI strategy—built on open-source software and bottom-up adoption—with America’s complete absence of AI policy. The Chinese approach is more inclusive

No AI Good Guys? Andrew & Keith Ask If Altman Amodei, & Hegseth Have All Failed the Leadership Test

“All my life, I’ve absolutely opposed all terrorism by anyone under any circumstances. I define terrorism as the deliberate killing of noncombatants.” — Daniel Ellsberg, October 2001



Last week we had Tom Wells on the show talking about Henry Kissinger’s moral indifference to the loss of innocent lives in the Vietnam war. Henry Kissinger, of course, was no fan of the Pentagon Papers— the leaked documents that showed the American government was lying about Vietnam, thereby changing public opinion about the war and helping end it. And the Pentagon Papers are forever associated with one brave man: Daniel Ellsberg, Harvard economist, RAND Corporation strategist, marine, Pentagon insider—and America’s most famous whistleblower.

Ellsberg died in 2023 at the age of 92. Now his son Michael Ellsberg [https://www.ellsberg.net/] has co-edited a posthumous collection of his father’s previously unpublished writing. Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope [https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Consequence-Collected-Daniel-Ellsberg/dp/1639735518] draws from a hundred boxes of handwritten notebooks in nearly illegible script, spanning fifty years of moral reckoning. Daniel Ellsberg didn’t much care about publishing these notes. His son thought otherwise.

What emerges is not another memoir of the Pentagon Papers but a book of ideas—about the nature of evil, the morality of obedience, and what Ellsberg called “civic courage”: taking nonviolent risks when your democracy is in danger. He was inspired not by intellectuals but by young draft resisters going to jail. Daniel Ellsberg’s moral lineage ran from Thoreau through Gandhi to Martin Luther King. And his moral absolute was uncompromising: the deliberate killing of civilians is “terrorism”, whoever orders it. By that definition, Daniel Ellsberg defined Harry Truman as a terrorist. Not to mention morally indifferent politicians like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Michael Ellsberg is candid about growing up in Berkeley with a father who was loving but distracted—a free-range parent who spent his evenings filling yellow legal pads rather than playing baseball. He’s equally candid about what his father would be saying right now: that whatever rationale exists for the Iran war, there are official plans and reasoning that the American public should know about but doesn’t. The Pentagon Papers proved the government lied. The question, as American bombs once again rain down on innocent civilians, is whether anything has changed in the last sixty years since “terrorists” like Henry Kissinger lied to the American public about Vietnam.

 

Five Takeaways



•       You Are Being Lied to More Than You Realise: That was Ellsberg’s message in 1971, and his son says it’s his message now. Whatever rationale Trump has for the Iran war, Michael Ellsberg argues, there are plans and reasoning the public should know about but doesn’t. The Pentagon Papers proved the government lied about Vietnam. The question is whether anything has changed.

•       The Establishment Man Who Became a Traitor: Daniel Ellsberg was Harvard-educated, a RAND Corporation strategist, a marine, a Pentagon aide working under McNamara. He was not a hippie. He was a silent-generation insider who watched the system lie about a war everyone inside knew was hopeless—and decided the public had a right to know.

•       All Deliberate Killing of Civilians Is Terrorism: In an essay written in October 2001, Ellsberg proposed a moral absolute: the deliberate killing of noncombatants is terrorism, whoever does it—left or right, aggressor or defender, first world or third. By that definition, Hiroshima was terrorism and Truman was a terrorist. No lesser-evil exceptions.

•       Civic Courage Is as Important as Military Courage

What Would Daniel Ellsberg Say About Iran? His Son Michael on America’s Most Famous Whistleblower

“I don’t think we’re sleepwalking, because people have striven to be as thoughtful as possible. In some ways, they’ve been too thoughtful. We’re paralysed, in fact, by our risk awareness.” — Christopher Clark



It’s 1830 in East Prussia. The city of Königsberg still bathed in the amber glow of the late Enlightenment—at least in the minds of people who’d never been there. But that glow, it goes without saying, is illusionary. The greatest of all Königsberg citizens, the illustrious 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant is dead. Napoleon’s shattered army limped west back through the city two decades earlier after its failed invasion of Russia. The place had slipped into a sad provinciality, living off 18th century nostalgia. And then two Lutheran preachers, so-called “Muckers”, get accused of running a sex cult.

Christopher Clark [https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-christopher-clark]—Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, author of the brilliant The Sleepwalkers [https://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalkers-How-Europe-Went-1914/dp/0061146668] and Revolutionary Spring [https://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Spring-Fighting-World-1848-1849/dp/0525575227]—has been brooding on this story for thirty years. His short new book, A Scandal in Königsberg [https://www.amazon.com/Scandal-K%C3%B6nigsberg-Christopher-Clark/dp/B0FCRPCF9B], is a Prussian microhistory with global ambition. The scandal, he says, was entirely fabricated: no sexual transgressions ever occurred. The two Muckers were convicted, stripped (so to speak) of office, and imprisoned, then exonerated on appeal – giving this case more historical significance than a mere sex scandal.

What made them targets? They were evangelical in a city that prized Kantian rationalism. They followed a dead mystic who believed creation was born from two cosmic spheres—fire and water—which sounded like dangerously mystical in the scientific age of steam power. And the lead preacher, Johann Ebel, committed the unforgivable sin of listening to women confess their unhappy marriages. In a pre-Freudian central Europe, Ebel became the confidant the men of Königsberg couldn’t abide.

And then there’s Iran — far from 19th century East Prussia, but on all of our minds right now. At the end of our conversation, I couldn’t resist asking Clark if he thinks we are sleepwalking into another catastrophic world war. He doesn’t think so. The problem in 1914 was a failure of imagination, he says. Today, Clark argues, we’re actually paralysed by a fear of risk. The Iran invasion is certainly stress testing the international system. But the one thing most people agree on, Clark notes with characteristic dryness, is that nobody much regrets any damage done to the regime of the Mullahs. Even if, as he warns, we still don’t know whether decision to invade Iran was smart or reckless. The Mullahs, at least, aren’t quite Muckers.

 

Five Takeaways



•       This Was a Scandal Without a Transgression: Most scandals expose something real. The Mucker scandal was different: the sexual allegations were entirely invented. Two clergymen were stripped of office, fined, and imprisoned—then exonerated on appeal when a sharp young lawyer proved the charges were fabrications. The process of invention, Clark argues, is more interesting than any transgression could have been.

•       Steam Was the AI of the 1830s: The two preachers at the center of the scandal were followers of a dead mystic who believed creation was born from two cosmic spheres—fire and water. In the age of steam, that sounded like science. Königsbergers only saw their first steam engine in the 1820s. New technology makes old ideas feel prophetic—a pattern we might recognise.

•       The Preacher Women Loved: Johann Ebel attracted women fr

From the Muckers to the Mullahs: Christopher Clark on the Lessons of History

“We should all be able to look at the numbers and agree that this is not sustainable and that whatever we’ve been doing is not working. Democrats have had their chance, and Republicans have had their chance, and it’s only gotten worse.” — Halle Tecco

Warren Buffett called America’s healthcare costs “a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” That tapeworm now devours nearly a fifth of the nation’s GDP—and the patient, as always, is on the table. We dedicate today’s show to this most perennial of all America’s problems, with two guests and two new books that approach the tragi-comedy from different angles.

Self-styled innovation wonk Halle Tecco [https://www.halletecco.com/]—founder of Rock Health, investor in over fifty digital health companies, professor at Columbia Business School—argues in Massively Better Healthcare [https://www.amazon.com/Massively-Better-Healthcare-Innovators-Healthcares/dp/023122236X] that the system is both excessively public and excessively private, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy in which verticalized health plans now own the PBMs, the pharmacies, and increasingly the doctors. The result is monopoly medicine on a scale that would have appalled the original trust-busters.

This is ultimately an antitrust story. As we’ve discussed on the show with Tim Wu, Biden’s chief antitrust enforcer, the concentration of corporate power is the great unfinished business of American democracy. Tecco makes the case that Big Med is where the trust busters should go next after Big Tech. UnitedHealth is now one of the largest employers of doctors in the country. So it wasn’t exactly shocking when the UnitedHealth CEO was assassinated two years ago. The system isn’t broken, Tecco suggests. It’s working exactly as designed—just not for patients.

Surgeon Robin Blackstone, MD [https://robinblackstone.com/], author of Doctor AI: Reimagining Health. Rebuilding Trust. Delivering Health 4.0 [https://www.amazon.com/Doctor-Reimagining-Health-Rebuilding-Delivering/dp/B0FX33WQFH], joins us in the second half of the show to offer a view from the front lines. After 30 years as a surgeon, Blackstone confirms everything Tecco diagnoses—and adds a chilling detail of her own: the system is priced entirely for fixing illness, not preventing it. Her prescription is a “triangle of trust” between patient, physician, and AI—with the patient finally owning their own data.

Both agree on one thing: every dollar spent on public health saves $14.30 in medical and societal costs. We are all already paying for all the waste. We just need to fix Big Med. But who’s going to do it? Tecco says that America is ready for another round of Obamacare politics. But I’m not so sure.

 

Five Takeaways



•       Healthcare Is a Tale of Two Civilizations: If you’re wealthy, you go to UCSF and get the best care in the world. If you’re not, you’re one of the 100 million Americans without a regular primary care provider. Healthcare debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy. A person earning $30,000 in a rural county can expect to live a full decade less than someone earning $100,000 in an affluent suburb.

•       The Real Winners Are Monopoly Medicine: Verticalized health plans now own the PBMs, the pharmacies, and increasingly the providers. The ACA’s profit cap forced them to grow the pie instead of getting more efficient. United is now one of the largest employers of doctors in the country. Independent pharmacies are closing at the rate of one per day. Rite Aid is bankrupt—the only major chain not owned by a health plan.

•       Every $1 in Public Health Saves $14.30: We’re already paying for the crisis—in emergency room visits, lost productivity, and disability. We just need to move the safety net upstream. Public health is the only part of the system

How To Fix Big Med: Halle Tecco and Robin Blackstone on American Healthcare and its Discontents

“If we let things continue in the direction that they are taking now, I think it is more likely than not that we will end up in some kind of Great Power war within the foreseeable future.” — Arne Westad



This conversation was recorded before the invasion of Iran, which makes what you are about to hear even more chilling. In his new book, The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History, Yale historian Arne Westad warns that the structural parallels between our multipolar 2020s and the world before the First World War are too striking to ignore—and he names the Middle East as one of the flashpoints that could spark a much broader conflagration.

Westad argues that the structural parallels between our multipolar 2020s and the world before the First World War are “striking.” A dominant power (USA) withdrawing from the international system it created. Rising inequality and globalization backlash. New technologies that speed up time and shrink the window for decision-making. A rising Great Power—China—that, like Wilhelmine Germany, simply cannot stop growing. And a declining empire—Russia—that, like Austria-Hungary, has quarrels on every border and an alliance with the rising power next door.

The cast of characters, Westad warns, is also uncomfortably familiar. Trump is Joseph Chamberlain—the British conservative who turned his party against the free trade system it had championed. Putin’s Russia is Austria-Hungary: an empire in long-term decline that acted in 1914 because it believed Germany would back it up. And nuclear weapons? Before 1914, people wrote long books about how new military technologies made war unthinkable. We are taking refuge in that same bad logic today.

The difference, Westad insists, is that we know how 1914 ended. We have international institutions built to prevent it. And we still have time—but not much, he warns—to forge the kind of Great Power compromise that could pull us back from the brink. Whether we will is another question entirely. Especially given our current historical amnesia. So might Archduke Ferdinand be Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this time around? Stay tuned. It’s squeaky bum time once again in world history.

 

Five Takeaways



•       We’re Living in a Pre-1914 Moment: A multipolar world. Rising inequality. Globalization backlash. New technologies that speed up time and reduce the window for decision-making. A dominant power withdrawing from the international system it created. The structural parallels between the early 20th century and the 2020s are, in Westad’s word, “striking.”

•       China Is the New Germany: A rapidly rising Great Power that can’t stop growing, generating dissonance in an established international system. As the British told the Germans: “If you could just stop growing, little Hans, all would be fine and dandy.” That’s exactly what China cannot do. And it takes two to tango on compromise.

•       Russia Is the New Austria-Hungary: An empire in long-term decline with quarrels on every border, allied to the most rapidly rising Great Power next to it. Austria acted in 1914 because they believed Germany would back them up. The parallel to the China-Russia relationship today is uncomfortably close.

•       Trump Is Joseph Chamberlain: The British conservative who turned his party against the free trade system it had championed. Chamberlain never made it to prime minister, but he came close and reshaped his party in ways no one foresaw—exactly what Trump has done to the Republicans.

•       Nuclear Weapons May Not Save Us: Before 1914, people wrote long books about how new military technologies—poison gas, battleships, aerial bombardment—made war unthinkable. We are taking refuge in the same logic today. Westad is not so sure the deterrent fully holds anymore.

 </

The Coming Storm: Odd Arne Westad Asks If We're On the Brink of World War Three

“When you use humor to degrade people, you can get away with it—but you’re also doing something that’s completely devastating.” — Rae Lynn Barnes


Donald Trump’s recent retweet of Barack and Michelle Obama depicted as apes was dismissed by his supporters as “just a joke”—another example, they claimed, of liberals lacking a sense of humor. But Princeton historian Rae Lynn Barnes argues that this kind of “humor” is anything but innocent. It draws on a centuries-long white supremacist tradition of dehumanization—one that stretches back to the origins of American mass entertainment itself.

In her book, Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, Barnes traces how Blackface minstrelsy became the quintessential American cultural form—America’s first great entertainment export—shaping music, comedy, performance, and politics from the 19th century through the 20th. Barnes explains how P.T. Barnum helped popularize the grotesque “scientific” spectacle of Black people as the missing link in evolution, and how the Barnum model of hoax-driven mass media foreshadows Trump’s own relationship with controversy, “fake news,” and attention.

Barnes argues that Blackface wasn’t merely a fringe theatrical practice. It was normalized—then institutionalized—through schools, churches, civic clubs, and even the federal government. The result was an intergenerational system for teaching white supremacy through catchy songs, jokes, and seemingly harmless performance.

For Barnes, the most important chapter of the Darkology story is the Black resistance minstrelsy triggered—from Frederick Douglass’s campaign of dignified self-representation to NAACP organizers and Black veterans who fought to remove minstrel shows from schools and public life. Rather than anti-American, Barnes insists that confronting this censored cultural history is the patriotic duty of all Americans. That’s America’s defining story, she says. The pursuit of freedom—and the ongoing struggle to live up to it.

 

Five Takeaways

1. Racist Humor Has Deep Roots: What gets dismissed today as “just a joke” belongs to a centuries-old tradition of dehumanizing caricature that masked cruelty as entertainment.

1. Blackface Was America’s Cultural Foundation: Minstrelsy shaped American comedy, music, performance—and even political campaigning. It was the quintessential American entertainment form.

1. Barnum Invented the Spectacle Model: Hoax-driven media sensation fused with racial pseudo-science and spectacle long before modern political showmanship adopted the formula.

1. White Supremacy Was Taught as Fun: Catchy songs, simple dances, and comic routines created an intergenerational system of racial socialization embedded in schools, churches, and civic clubs.

1. Patriotism Requires Historical Honesty: Confronting this censored past strengthens democracy. America’s defining story is the pursuit of freedom—not the denial of injustice.

 

About the Guest

Rae Lynn Barnes is a historian and professor at Princeton University. She is the author of Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment.

 

References

Previous Keen On episodes mentioned:

1. None

 

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

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Chapters:

 * (00:00) - Introduction
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Racism as Entertainment: Rae Lynn Barnes on Darkology and American Culture

“If you disestablish Christianity, then Christian leaders need to make Christianity a consumer product. They need to give the American people something they want.” — Matthew Avery Sutton



Over the years, Keen On has done many shows on the relationship between the United States and organized religion. Daniel Williams argued that smart people still believe in God. Jim Wallis warned that a false white gospel is threatening America. But we’ve never quite done a show on Christianity as “the thing in itself”—the force that made America what it is, for better and for worse. That’s what this conversation is about.

Historian Matthew Avery Sutton [https://www.matthew-a-sutton.com/]’s new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity [https://www.amazon.com/Chosen-Land-Christianity-America-Americans/dp/1541646339], is a sweeping argument that Christianity is not just part of the American story—it is the American story. The founders created a godless Constitution not out of principle but pragmatism: they couldn’t pick a winning denomination. The unintended consequence was to open the floodgates. Powerful Protestant groups seized even more power, building an unofficial establishment that shaped everything from westward expansion to the Civil War to the rise of the religious right.

Sutton’s most provocative insight is that disestablishment turned Christianity into a consumer product. Forced to compete for adherents against entertainment, sports, and media, American churches became entrepreneurial, technologically savvy, and relentlessly current—reinventing themselves every generation. That’s what sets American Christianity apart from the rest of the Western world. It also helps explain Trump: a president who uses Christianity in a “crass, overt, and hypocritical” way, but who is doing something that generations before him built the infrastructure to enable. Whether this is Christianity’s last gasp or the prelude to another great revival, Sutton says, nobody knows. But the air we breathe in America is Christian air, and this book explains how it got that way.

 

Five Takeaways



•       The Godless Constitution Backfired: The founders couldn’t pick a winning denomination, so they disestablished religion. It was pragmatic, not ideological. But this opened the floodgates. The Christians who already had the most power—Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians—seized even more, creating an unofficial Protestant establishment that determined who was in and who was out.

•       Christianity Became a Consumer Product: Disestablishment forced churches to compete for adherents. They had to be aggressive, entrepreneurial, current—competing with entertainment, sports, and media. They became masters of new technologies and communication, reinventing Christianity every generation. That’s what sets American Christianity apart from the rest of the world: an unintended consequence of the First Amendment.

•       The Civil War Was Christians Killing Christians: Presbyterians killing Presbyterians, Methodists killing Methodists. It exposed the fragility of the effort to build a Christian utopia when you can’t settle the question of slavery. The Confederates actually wrote God and Jesus Christ into their constitution—they believed the Union had gone off the rails because its Constitution was too godless.

•       The Liberationists Are the Heroes: Indigenous preachers who saw Jesus as liberator, Black Christians, gay rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s, Barack Obama. There have always been alternative visions of Christianity in America. Sutton’s heroes are those who see Jesus as a radical figure who wants to overturn hierarchies and bring equality.

•       This May Be Christianity’s Last Gasp—Or N

A Chosen Land for a Chosen People? Matthew Avery Sutton on How Christianity Made America and America Remade Christianity

“We keep telling you there’s an eviction crisis, so organize with us. Feel free to come into our meetings. Feel free to learn about the lives of people who have been here for a long time.” — Manissa Maharawal



Yesterday we spoke with anthropologist Ida Susser about France’s Yellow Vests—provincial truck drivers, nurses, and teachers who drove hours to Paris, furious about decades of disinvestment in their economy. So does America have its own Yellow Vests? You might find them in (of all places) the San Francisco Bay Area, the setting of a new book by a former student of Susser’s about what happens when the same disruptive economic forces hit an American city.

Anthropologist Manissa Maharawal [https://www.american.edu/cas/faculty/manissam.cfm]’s new book, Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco [https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Eviction-Gentrification-Francisco-California-Anthropology/dp/0520423356], chronicles the grassroots movement that rose up against big tech during the boom of the 2010s. Like the French Yellow Vests, these were ordinary people from the San Francisco Bay Area—teachers, bartenders, nurses, copy editors—who refused to accept their displacement as inevitable. Like the Yellow Vests, they grew out of no political party or even ideology. The anti-eviction movement emerged from Occupy, just as the gilets jaunes emerged from the roundabouts outside Paris.

Anti-tech activists in San Francisco’s Mission District watched Google buses roll through their neighborhoods and decided to blockade them. But where the Yellow Vests defied the left-right spectrum, Maharawal’s activists have a clear target: the neoliberal market logic that justifies gentrification as the result of “inevitable” market forces. She is sharply critical of the abundance argument advanced by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, arguing this supposedly free market has given the Bay Area a glut of luxury housing and almost no affordable units. The real crisis, she says, isn’t too few homes—it’s too little regulation on the homes we already have.

Fifteen million sit vacant in the United States, Maharawal reminds us. Private equity firms are buying up a quarter of the housing on the market. Even Trump has woken up to this. In a moment of political pessimism on both sides of the Atlantic, both Susser and Maharawal offer evidence that ordinary people can both organize and, at least, shape the political conversation.

 

Five Takeaways



•       Tech Gentrification Is Modern Colonization: Activists in San Francisco’s Mission District compared Google buses to conquistador transportation—rolling through their neighborhoods, stopping at their bus stops, letting in only young white tech workers while longtime residents stood by with their children. San Francisco had become a company town for the tech industry, with the city rolling out a red carpet—including massive tax breaks—while people in surrounding neighborhoods were evicted.

•       The Market Will Never Solve This—And That’s the Point: It’s never going to be profitable enough to build the deeply affordable low-income housing we actually need. That’s why all the housing built in the past fifteen years has been luxury housing. New York City has entire half-empty skyscrapers. San Francisco consistently meets its targets for luxury construction but fails on low-income housing. Market-based solutions alone are insufficient.

•       Rent Control Stabilizes Lives, Not Just Rents: Maharawal grew up in a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City—it’s the reason her family could stay. Rent stabilization gives people a chance to imagine a future somewhere. The real foil isn’t small landlords; it’s private equity firms making billions off rental housing. A statewide rent cap proposal in California didn’t even

American Yellow Vests? Manissa Maharawal on the Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco

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