Today we have a documentary episode examining and analyzing the ongoing pro-Palestine uprisings at campuses around the country. We look at the horrifying facts on the ground in Gaza that have caused U.S. students to risk their academic careers in solidarity demonstrations. We discuss how universities have repressed the demonstrations an a manner disturbingly reminiscent of authoritarian states. We expose the myths that the protests are hateful, antisemitic, and pro-terror. And we put the demonstrations in context, looking at how prior generations of anti-war students were similarly motivated to take a stance against violence and injustice.This episode is free to the public and unlocked, because of the subject matter's importance. But Current Affairs is funded entirely by its readers, and can't continue to produce new work without your support, so if you enjoy our work, please consider purchasing a Patreon membership, magazine subscription, or donating to our organization.Jon Ben-Menachem's Zeteo essay is here.Rashid Khalidi's full interview is here.W.D. Ehrhart's full interview is here.More from Dr. Thrasher on what he saw at Columbia is here.The Intercepted episode quoting Yasser Khan is here.Full video of the quoted speech at the Columbia demonstration is here.Further coverage of the protests can be found in the Current Affairs News Briefing.Portions of this radio essay were adapted from the Current Affairs articles "My Date With Destiny" and "Palestine Protests are a Test of Whether This is a Free Country." Script and audio editing by Nathan J. Robinson, who is responsible for any errors.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and activist whose latest book is The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, based on her CBC Massey Lectures. Today she joins to discuss the themes of her lectures, which are build around the ideas of security and insecurity. What makes us actually "secure"? Security is a word that has right-wing connotations (surveillance cameras, security guards, etc.) But we know that there is another kind of security, the kind promised by programs like Social Security. Astra explains why she, as a longtime activist for debtors, thinks we live in an "age of insecurity" and distinguishes between the kinds of "existential" insecurities we are stuck with and the "manufactured" ones we might be able to get rid of. “My perspective is shaped by the years I’ve spent focused on the topic of inequality and its pernicious effects on culture and democracy both in my creative work as a filmmaker and writer and as an activist. Nearly a decade ago, I helped found the Debt Collective, the world’s first union for debtors, which has become a bastion for people who are broke and overwhelmed. Inequality is, indeed, out of control, with ten billionaire men possessing six times more wealth than the poorest three billion people on earth.6 But numbers do not capture the true nature or extent of the crisis. Insecurity, in contrast, describes how inequality is lived day after day. Where inequality can be represented by points on a graph, insecurity speaks to how those points feel, hovering in space over a tattered safety net or nothing at all. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 1989 study of the psychology of the middle class, dubbed the condition “fear of falling.” But today there’s barely any middle left, and everyone is afraid of what lies below.” - Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity An article Nathan wrote commenting on the book's themes is here. 

Myisha Cherry, a philosopher, explains why anger is rational and essential for anti-racist struggle, challenging the misconception that reason and emotion are opposites. She discusses how anger can coexist with love and compassion, emphasizing the importance of reflective anger. Cherry argues that embracing the right kind of anger can help build a better world by expressing the value of people of color and promoting racial justice.

Malaika Jabali, author of 'It's Not You, It's Capitalism', discusses how capitalism mirrors toxic relationships, highlighting socialist roots of color. She explores unethical financial practices, presents socialist ideas through modern lens, and showcases innovative anti-capitalism approach in 2023.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Today we take a dive into the world of "corporate bullshit" with Nick Hanauer, who has become an expert on spotting and debunking it. Nick is a businessman who became known for warning of the devastating social effects of plutocracy, and who now hosts the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast which presents sharp conversations with leading progressive economic experts. Nick's latest project is the book Corporate Bullsh*t, written with Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen. (Listen to Donald's appearance on the CA podcast here.) The book dives into American history to show how every time a progressive reform was proposed, the corporate PR machine spun the proposal as a job-killer, a socialist plot, the end of civilization, etc. Some of the examples collected in the book are truly galling, as Nathan explains in his review of the book here. On this episode, we look at some of the common tendencies used in corporate propaganda and why they can be persuasive to people. We also discuss how Nick came to be a public opponent of plutocracy, and we have a short digression on the fraudulence of the "MyPillow," since Nick comes from a family of immigrants who spent a century making pillows and bedding.Over the past century and a half, on a broad range of issues including the minimum wage, workplace safety, environmental regulations, consumer protection—even on morally indisputable issues like child labor and racial segregation—the people and corporations who profited from the status quo have effectively wielded a familiar litany of groundless ‘economic’ claims and fear mongering rhetoric in their efforts to slow or quash necessary reforms. As even a cursory examination of the quotes we’ve included in this book will show, the wealthy and powerful are willing to say anything—even the worst things imaginable—to retain their wealth and power. But while there is simply no bottom to this well of shamelessness, there is a pattern. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/currentaffairs !Dr. Luke Messac is an emergency physician and historian whose new book is Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine (Oxford University Press). Messac also wrote the article "Why Medical Debt Forgiveness Drives Are Not Enough" for Current Affairs. Messac's book looks at the entire history of medical debt, how hospitals went from being (somewhat) charitable institutions to farming debt collection out to huge companies that make massive profits off shaking down poor people. He joins today to explain the harms that medical debt does to patients' lives (and to their relationships with their doctors), how the debt collection industry works, and why things don't have to be this way. "We must reckon with the bounty hunters of medicine: the debt collectors who haunt the lives of the millions of Americans who cannot pay for their medical care. Any solution that leaves intact an industry that profits off the financial captivity of the poor cannot credibly be called just. It is time to build a future without medical debt or its collectors." — Luke Messac 

Jonathan Taplin has had a fascinating career, from being a tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band to a film producer for Martin Scorsese to running the Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California's communications school. In recent years, he has turned his attention to writing critically about the tech elite. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy focused on leading monopolistic corporations. His new book, The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto, examines four leading billionaires (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen). Each of them is extremely powerful and has a vision for the future of the world. Taplin thinks those visions are bleak, antidemocratic, and dystopian. He joins us to explain how he thinks these men are destroying our culture and even trying to "end reality." Taplin's background in rock-n-roll and New Hollywood gives him a distinctive perspective on the cultural degradation that these billionaires are contributing to, from the erosion of musicians' livelihoods through streaming services to the threat posed to quality cinema by a nonstop stream of billion-dollar AI-written superhero movies.“There is a choice about what the future holds, and it’s not necessarily Mark Zuckerberg’s or Elon Musk’s to make. The fight that remains will be to once again assert the possibility of constructing our lives as free and autonomous persons in a natural world not destroyed by industrial pollution and not ruled by the algorithms of the tech monopolies. It will be to resist this future of pseudo-experience and fantasy exploration. That resistance will require both government regulation and the individual decisions of millions of citizens around the world about how they are going to use technology. Fortunately these four technologies of the Metaverse, crypto, transhumanism, and space travel are in their early stages of adoption...[My greatest fear is] that enchanted by the magic of the Technocrats’ “immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life,” we will sleep through a right-wing revolution and wake up to find our democracy gone and our children being turned into Meta cyborgs. Let us wake up and resist the end of reality.” — Jonathan Taplin, The End of RealityRead the Current Affairs critique of Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto" here. Our episode on the relationship between MySpace and music is here. The crypto story is fleshed out in our previous episode with Zeke Faux.

Zeke Faux of Bloomberg News is the author of a fascinating and hilarious new book about the crypto world and the collapse of the Sam Bankman-Fried empire, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. In contrast with Michael Lewis, whose recent book Going Infinite also looks at Bankman-Fried, Faux sees the scamming and lying of the crypto world for what it is, and his book is highly conscious of the harm done to victims by the fraudulence of Bankman-Fried and others. (Faux's book begins: "'I’m not going to lie,’ Sam Bankman-Fried told me. This was a lie.") Today, Faux joins to answer all of the most pressing questions about SBF, FTX, crypto, and the very dumb world of "NFTs," like:When did SBF's (alleged) crimes become detectable? Is Michael Lewis right that at the core of FTX was a "great real business" that was undone by bad luck?When Zeke confronted Jimmy Fallon about all the money people lost by investing in NFTs, how did Fallon justify promoting them?Since Sam Bankman-Fried rationalized his every action in terms of its "expected value" calculation, how did he justify playing video games all the time?Was SBF's "effective altruism" ever actually sincere?Why would anyone ever have bought a "bored ape" image for millions of dollars?What insights about the human condition can be gleaned from examining the world of crypto?Bankman-Fried said that I was wrong. Crypto wasn’t a scam, and neither was Tether. But he wasn’t offended by my question. He said he totally understood my problem. Then he did something that didn’t strike me as strange at the time. But knowing what I know now, I can’t help but wonder if he was trying to make some kind of winking confession. Bankman-Fried cut me off, nodding, as I tried to explain more. His tone turned chipper. He said: “It’s like the narrative would be way sexier if it was like, ‘Holy shit, this is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme,’ right?”Right.— Zeke Faux, Number Go Up Listeners may also be interested in prior episodes on crypto/NFTs/"Web3" with Stephen Diehl, Molly White, and Nicholas Weaver. Incidentally, Sam Bankman Fried is testifying in his criminal trial today.  It's also never a bad time to reread our 2021 article "Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud." 

Nathan Thrall, the former Director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, is the author of two books on Israel and Palestine: The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine and most recently A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which focuses on the tribulations of a Palestinian father in the aftermath of a personal tragedy. Because his book is about Palestinians under occupation, several of Thrall's book events have been canceled since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Based in Jerusalem, Thrall joins us to explain the current state of Israeli society, and to tell us more about the reality of life for Palestinians under occupation. “For all the blame that was cast, no one—not the investigators, not the lawyers, not the judges—named the true origins of the calamity. No one mentioned the chronic lack of classrooms in East Jerusalem, a shortage that led parents to send their children to poorly supervised West Bank schools. No one pointed to the separation wall and the permit system that forced a kindergarten class to take a long, dangerous detour to the edge of Ramallah rather than driving to the playgrounds of Pisgat Ze’ev, a stone’s throw away. ... No one noted that the absence of emergency services on one side of the separation wall was bound to lead to tragedy. No one said that the Palestinians in the area were neglected because the Jewish state aimed to reduce their presence in greater Jerusalem, the place most coveted by Israel. For these acts, no one was held to account.” —  Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Political scientist Jerome Slater is the author of one of the best one-volume summaries of the background of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020 (Oxford University Press). Slater argues in the book that the possibilities for a peaceful resolution to the conflict were consistently eroded by Israel’s refusal to withdraw to its legal borders and successive Israeli leaders’ staunch opposition to a Palestinian state. Slater’s exhaustively documented but accessible work also predicted that Israel’s policies toward Palestine were creating the conditions for a “disaster.” Three years later, Slater’s predictions have tragically come true. He joins to explain the background to the conflict.“I’ve become convinced that Israel, with essentially blind US Jewish and government support, is well along the road to both a moral and security disaster.” — Jerome Slater, Mythologies Without End (2020) This interview is available as a transcript here.