Is Trump still running scared of the Epstein files? | The News Agents

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always vote, which votes whichever way the wind is blowing, then we have mob rule.

Trump basically launched a personal vendetta, branding Massey a moron, a nutjob, a loser.

On one level, what this shows you is that Trump still has a very firm grip on his party.But on the other hand, you are starting to see something emerge, which is no dissent, no guardrails, no voices.If you disagree with the president, you're out.

Today is the six month anniversary of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.We've taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture, and that was just six months.I got seven months left in Congress.

That is Republican Congressman Thomas Massey.Someone who has led the charge for the release and publication of the Jeffrey Epstein files.He has just lost a fight to retain his seat in Congress because he lost the support of Donald Trump.

He has been a troublemaker for Trump over the last year or so and this is clearly how it ends.Does this mean that Trump has a grip on the party like never before or does it mean he's still terrified of Epstein?Welcome to the News Agents.

The News Agents.

It's Lewis.It's Maitlis.And as you heard there, Thomas Massey, who's been in Congress for 14 years, as Emily was saying, he has been he's not been the only person, but he has been absolutely instrumental in those Epstein files being released, the forced disclosure through the force of law from the Department of Justice, something that Donald Trump never wanted to happen.Well, he's paid the price because what happened is, is that Trump basically launched a Saturday campaign a personal vendetta ever since that day.period, branding Massey a moron, a nutjob, a loser.He's dispatched his own top advisors to run a concerted political campaign against him.

He even traveled to Kentucky himself for a rally denouncing Massey as disloyal to the United States of America.And, you know, we're not talking in Massey here as someone who is some kind of dyed in the wool liberal or anything like that.He is a deeply libertarian minded conservative.But this issue really gripped him.and as a result he finds himself now he's lost the primary contest in Kentucky for his seat and the reason this is interesting is he this was the Epstein issue that is was something that was constantly posited by critics of Trump and others as suggesting this would be the thing because it exercised so much of his base because so much of his base were obsessed with the idea there had been this huge conspiracy and it was bringing in all levels of the elite that this would be the thing that broke Trump's hold over the MAGA base.

little bit about Thomas Massey because he is, I guess, what you'd call an independent minded Republican.He lives in an off the grid farm, a solar panelled house.He lives in a village in Garrison, Kentucky, of about 500 people.And he has always won his re -election in general election terms by around 60 % of the vote.In other words, Kentucky is a deep red Republican part of the world.And he has been a popular figure there.

He has won with ease there.So the fact that he's even been primaried tells you something instantly, which is not that he looked in danger of kind of losing his seat to a Democrat.That's really never going to happen in Kentucky.But the fact that he was being primaried tells you that he has angered Trump.Now, how did this anger start?Well, it either started with the Epstein files, some nine, ten months ago, but it has intensified in recent months because he was pretty outspoken with Trump over the war in Iran from its very first hours.

Massie was somebody who was an outspoken critic of the war.He said that the president had violated the constitution by striking Iran.Remember, he did this without getting congressional approval, didn't go through the legislature at all.And he has said that the war contradicts Trump's 2024 election campaign.It has come at a steep economic cost.So all this was part of the reason why Trump basically turned on Massie and said, you don't seem to like my platform.

You don't seem to like what I'm doing.And Massie has argued actually the opposite.He said, look, when I agree with you, which as a Republican is 90 % of the time, I vote with you.I don't have a problem voting with you.But when I think that something is wrong, I speak out.I have a voice.

I'm, you know, libertarian, independent, Republican voice.I speak for the people.of Kentucky.I think the war was wrong.I think the war was costly.And I think the release of the Epstein files has been absolutely fundamental to ending what is perceived as a cover -up at the very top of government.

And what was curious was the way that Thomas Massie worked alongside a Democrat, Ro Khanna, again, something that Trump wouldn't really like, in a cross party movement that essentially pincered Trump into this place where he had no choice but to release the Epstein files.This all happened last autumn, last October, November.And there was a vote in the House where it was so overwhelming.It was so overwhelming in favour of releasing the Epstein files that Trump essentially threw up his hands and said, right, I'm not going to beat this.You might remember that was the occasion which Marjorie Taylor Greene became an outspoken critic of Trump.And she then left, she gave up her seat.

And other women, I think, Kristi Noem was one of them who was very outspoken and said, I don't want to be part of this cover up.And so essentially, it was Massey and Karner.And of course, it was Epstein's victims and their legal teams and the campaigners who basically brought around the release of the Epstein files.in December of last year.And I guess the question now for Trump is, do you hate anyone who is sort of making you think about Epstein, who is putting Epstein right in front of you on the plate?Or do you just hate people who disagree with you, who try to pull you in a direction, who try to fight you?

And I just want to play you this clip.This is Thomas Massey last night, and he is making the point of how important it is to be that dissenting voice when you feel you need to speak out.

If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king.If the legislative branch always votes whichever way the wind is blowing, then we have mob rule.But if the legislative branch and the representatives and the senators that serve with it always follow the constitution, we have a republic.

I do think this is the question that's now being raised.in America.On one level, what this shows you is that Trump still has a very firm grip on his party.We saw how he infected the primaries in Indiana, something we talked about on the News Agents USA a couple of weeks ago, that the Trump -backed candidates won against the people that he hadn't backed.So in other words, Trump isn't on the ballot in November.His name isn't on the ballot, but he is still influencing it.

But on the other hand, you are starting to see something emerge, which is no dissent.No guardrails, no voices.This has got to be an autocracy from now on, where if you disagree with the president, you're out.

I think what's particularly striking about this recent string, because it's not just Massey.We saw it with Louisiana Senator Paul Bill Cassidy, again, very conservative, but has been outspoken on Trump occasionally, including voted for his impeachment back in 2021.We've seen it again, where just in the last few days, Donald Trump decided to back the rival, for the Texas Senate race to a guy called John Cornyn, who is a very longstanding Republican senator, again, very conservative, but has occasionally spoken out against Trump, did vote for the impeachment.Trump has harbored that grudge ever since.This has dismayed Texans and the Republican establishment because they think that the guy who's endorsed, this guy called Ken Paxton, who's pretty extreme and out there, is unlikely to win that seat.I think what's amazing and particularly striking about this whole string of Trump endorsements

which leads to incumbent failures in the primary process is that this is happening as Trump should be entering the twilight of his political career and certainly is at the lowest ebb arguably of his two presidencies, his approval rating is at rock bottom.Americans are deeply, deeply dissatisfied with his economic record.They are deeply, deeply dissatisfied by his foreign adventurism, particularly the war in Iran.And normally when this happens, when you're in a president, which is going into that final midterm cycle, you know, year five, year six, year seven, and they're in the doldrums like this, the party starts to typically think about how to move away.how to reinvent itself for the next cycle, how to reinvent itself for the post -Trump era.What is so striking about these results is the extent to which the Republican grassroots are not thinking about that at all.

They are still completely in thrall and in hock to this guy who as far as most Americans are concerned, is now past it and is not addressing their concerns.And that is why, you know, potentially what we're seeing at the moment may be a hollow victory indeed for Trump, because although he's getting his revenge and he clearly hates these people, he hates, like you say, anyone, anyone who expresses any dissent at any time.He harbours those petty grudges.He hates these people.He'll be laughing and enjoying seeing their demise.But there are two short term political costs.

One is what Massey has already identified.He's still in Congress and Bill Cassidy is still in the Senate and all the other people that he's primaried and, you know, means they won't be able to stand again.They've got their terms and they could potentially.

And they don't care.They're arsonists now.

They do not care.You know, it is no F's given at this point.Right.So like he is, he's basically unleashed these people and there are all sorts of legislative problems he might have.I mean, it's going through the Senate at the moment.There's an attempt to basically rein him in on Iran.

People like Bill Cassidy now doing whatever they want.But the slightly longer term political cost as well is this, is that if you, if your primary, your primary voters are delivering candidates who are more and more out there, who are more and more completely in hock to Trump at precisely the moment that the country has moved so far away from Trump, guess what?it makes it so much easier for the Democrats to win and even likelier that they'll be able to take Congress back in November which will cause Trump to lose.or manner of difficulties for the final two years of his term.

Yeah.And let me just give you a sense of how much this mattered to Trump.Right.This was one of the, if not the most expensive primary that the country has ever seen.It cost twenty three million dollars.Right.

Crazy.I mean, one Congress seat.But it's not even the seat.It's the primary for the seat.Right.So we're not talking about a whole general election.

We're not talking about a Senate seat.We're not talking about one Congress seat.We're talking about a primary seat between two members of the same party.

That's more than a UK party can spend on the entire general election in the UK.Right.

I mean, that puts it into context, right?And it mattered so much to Trump that in the middle of an actual war, they sent down Pete Hegseth, you know, frat boy Pete, who has no connection with Kentucky, who has no connection, frankly, with any country in the world.Congressional primary, they took him away from managing the war.You know, they stopped the war to make him go and and stump for Massey's rival, this guy called Gilrine.And this is what he said when he went to Kentucky.

President Trump does not need more people in Washington who are trying to make a point, especially from his own party.He needs people willing to help him win, to vote with him.when it matters the most.And too often Thomas Massie has acted like his job is to stand apart from the movement that President Trump leads instead of strengthening it.

Now the whole point, as we know, of the way the American Congress is set up is to give the states a voice, right?This is why every state has two senators, no matter if they're big or small, the whole point is you have that voice in Congress.The Congress people that are sent to Washington are not meant to be there to agree with Trump.They're meant to be carrying the voices of their voters from the states that they've just left.And so when Pete Hegseth says, I mean, he actually spells it out, he says out loud, Trump doesn't need people who disagree with him.He needs people who agree with him.

It's actually amazing.We don't need people who want to make a point.doing some politics.

Yeah, no, no, we don't want that.Can you just sit down and shut up?Just vote the right way.And to your earlier point, which I think is absolutely right, is that the party is putting itself in a place where they are allowing huge swathes of people, swaths of people, the Americans would say, to just say, this isn't for me.Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, okay, admittedly, the news agents have had a little bit of beef with in the past, who resigned and sort of had this epiphany last year over Epstein has just posted on Twitter.This is what she said.

You'll rule, this is to Trump, you're ruled by the Epstein class that cares nothing about you and your elected leaders are bought and controlled by a foreign lobby.I think she means Israel, more of that in a moment.Tonight, the future of the Republican Party was destroyed.The real American movement will rise, led by the younger generations who hate the old guard with an unquenchable passion.Let us pray we have a country left by the time these creatures are gone.So she's basically making that point.

from inside the party itself.You might not care about the Epstein files, but there are plenty of people, younger Americans, young men, young women who would want to follow the Republican Party.And you're basically telling them that there is no place for them in your party because you're basically turning a blind eye to what is essentially a massive cover up right at the heart of government.And I think that is starting to spell out a whole new difference here, which is, you know, Trump has won election after election by being the insurgent, the one that came in, the one that broke things, the one that, you know, drained the swamp, blah, blah, blah.And now she is painting him as the old guard, the old guard who does not get it, who does not get people's anger and frustration and suspicion, because he's turning a blind eye to it and just getting rid of the people who raise the questions that millions of Americans actually do care about.

And look, something else which is fascinating, but I suppose also disturbing about this race is the extent to which it also adverts to the increasingly polar, the extent to which it adverts to the increasing polarisation within the Republican Party about Israel.Something we've talked about on the show before is the extent to which many leading Republican figures, from Tucker Carlson down, talking about Israel in a way in which you would never have expected Republicans to talk about it, suggesting sometimes, quite frankly, with thinly veiled antisemitism, suggesting that Jews are pulling the strings or the Israeli government is pulling the strings of the Iran war.Just listen to the way that Thomas Massie, in conceding yesterday, introduced his speech to his own party faithful.

Okay, so on the face of that, that sounds pretty anti -semitic, but We should try and give you a little bit of context for that, because the Israeli Public Affairs Committee, American -Israeli Public Affairs Committee, and other pro -Israel interest groups have put around $9 million into this bid to unseat Thomas Massie.They have given their money to Goron, and you can either say that they did it because they think that Massie is un -Israeli, or you can say that they were acting because they felt that they had Trump's backing to basically put the money where Trump wanted it to go.I mean, Massey, let's not forget, it's more complicated than just he's the good guy and the kind of the bloke who loves democracy.He's also been pretty visibly anti -LGBT in a seat which, frankly, is probably not particularly gay -friendly in America, right?

We're not talking about some liberal hero here.

It's not New Hampshire.It's not New York.It's Kentucky.And so there is an advert we're going to play you.And just to explain, this isn't Massey himself.This is a super PAC that was raising money on behalf of Thomas Massey.

And as soon as you hear it, you will understand that it is pretty much anti -Israeli and anti -LGBT.Because the super PAC, in other words, the kind of as around Massey think that they are playing to a core voter who is fed up with Israeli money coming into American elections and is fed up with, you know, whatever the LGBTmight look like.And they are trying to pin that on to Ed Gallrine.And so when you watch it, it is quite shocking.But I guess the important point of us telling you this is to put it back into this sort of deep red part of the world where a lot of voters won't actually be that shocked by what they're seeing on their TV screens.

And over a period of time, I and my team became quite friendly with legacy gay rights groups, including hardcore Democrats.

Paul Singer is a major pro -gay, pro -trans activist who works with far -left hardcore Democrats.

I became very interested in being a funder of gay rights groups.

Gowrin doesn't share our Kentucky values.He is with the weirdos.And if Gowrin wins, the weirdos take over.to woke Eddie Gahlrein and his billionaire club of LGBTQ weirdos.Re -elect Thomas Massie.For Kentucky.

For America.

I mean, yeah, the weirdos that they have just shown you are, you know, trans or LGBT or drag queens.And there is a star of David in the middle of that.So, you know, welcome to America attack ad land, which is quite frankly, something that thumps you in the face every time you see them.

And again, the thing to reinforce about that is that was an ad.It wasn't an ad of his campaign, but it was an ad supporting the guy that Trump has just removed.So, you know, again, as ever with modern MAGA politics, it's kind of hard to know who to root for sometimes.Fundamentally, it failed.

Now, did it fail because Kentucky is actuallypro -trans, pro -gay and, you know, pro -Israel?I don't know.Probably not, let's say.But did it fail because fundamentally the voice of Trump is stronger there?

Yes.And I think what we can say is that obviously it depends how all of this stuff is perceived after the midterms, like if it's perceived that Trump has helped drive the Republican Party into the ground by using the power of his office and his authority to damn sort of candidates who might have won, and that sort of happened back in 2018, then maybe the Republican Party starts really thinking about, you know, moving on for the 2028 cycle.But I think just as likely, just as likely, that Trump remains a dominant force in the 28 cycle in a way that we haven't seen with a two term outgoing president quite in the same way before.That he will be, although he won't be on the ballot in that election, that his presence, his ghost, his every kind of waking thought will be a big part of that campaign.And we will see inevitably it push and mutate and shape the candidates of that campaign in order to get his endorsement.What's the one thing you're going to want for the 28 campaign?

It's Trump's endorsement.and he will know it and he will apprentice style dangle it over them one by one.

I think exactly that.The point about the November midterms is that we won't see Trump's name on the ballot.Just like last time, his midterms, we didn't see Trump's name on those midterms.And actually, there was never the red way.The Republicans didn't do well.Joe Biden did much better than many had expected.

But actually, it was the same for Obama.Obama won in 2008 and had terrible midterms in 2010, but then came back.Right?He then came back in 2012.So the idea that their name isn't on the ballot might hurt for that round of elections, but it doesn't mean the whole game's over.

Well when we come back we're going to be talking to someone who actually thinks that all of these party political games and he thinks they are games are meaningless because democracy has been rendered meaningless by the fact that we have too many rich people dominating our society.He's got some interesting ideas as to what to do about it.Stay with us.Right we're talking a lot about economic and political change at the moment.We're obviously maybe going to have a new prime minister.We've got maybe an incoming prime minister who is talking about the need for transformational economic change in people's lives.

But what if actually we can't achieve that change?We can't achieve that economic change precisely because the political system we have, democracy, a system we think is designed to help us deal with extreme wealth and to improve the lives, economic lives of ordinary people.What if it can't?Precisely because democracy is the problem.Precisely because democracy is designed to keep wealth.the super rich rich and everybody else not.

Well, that is the kernel of the argument in the book The Blind Spot, how oligarchs dominate our democracies by Geoffrey Winters, essentially an argument that modern democracy has not failed to stop what he calls oligarchy.It's designed to accommodate it.Geoffrey Winters, thanks so much for coming in to the News Agents.I want to get on to sort of define some of your terms and what you mean by oligarchy and so on and how it interplays with democracy.But before we do, I was very struck, I mean, you started the book by actually talking about one of your earliest political memories.Just wondering if you might just relay that and explain how it relates to the thesis in your book.

Yes, I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, Ohio.I came from a smalla working class family.And my father, who was not a political person at all, would jump straight to the comics page and the sports page of the newspaper, suddenly blurted out in front of his friends, The rich control everything.And I just had a very distinct memory of this.And as a little kid, that made no sense.

I had been taught in school, we're in a democracy.And so I relay this as a sort of a journey that I start on.And I grow up and I go to college.And I begin to study the relationship between our political system and the inequality that we were experiencing.And finally, on to graduate school, where I'm able to study this in even greater depth.And what I come to discover is that We live in a political system which actually combines participation power, which is the essence of democracy.

People voting.People voting, people speaking, people criticizing, people rallying, protesting, all of those things.That's participation power.And all of us ordinary citizens have it.And oligarchs have participation power just like we do.But it turns out they have an additional power.

form of power, and that is the deployment of their wealth in that political system.

So before we go any further, I think it might be just quite useful for you to just tell us what you mean by oligarchs and oligarchy, because, of course, people talk a lot about elites, economic elites, political elites.They talk about the establishment.They talk about other words for this.But oligarchy is, it seems to me, a specific thing.Why do you talk about oligarchs and oligarchy as opposed to just say elites or whatever?

happens to be?So first of all, oligarchs, that's a very ancient term, goes all the way back to the Greeks, Aristotle, Plato, and so on.And it has always meant those who are empowered specifically by wealth.And then elites are actually, it's a much newer term.And it's broader one, much broader term, also quite true.And it refers to people who are also quite powerful, but not connected necessarily to wealth.

And so think of someone like Churchill, Gandhi, Joe Biden, Martin Luther King, these are people who have tremendous power, but it's not rooted in wealth.And so oligarchs are all the way back to the Roman Senate.They were people who actually, in that case, had political office, political positions, but also had tremendous wealth.As we move forward through history into the modern democratic era, one of the important things that happens is that oligarchs themselves no longer rule directly, or for quite a long time, they didn't.Actually, right now, what we have is a lot of very, very wealthy people who are now running directly in my own state of Illinois.The governor, the office of government, Pritzker, ran against another billionaire.

This is becoming increasingly common.But so think of oligarchs as it has nothing to do with the source of their wealth.So for a while people were saying Russian oligarchs.

I was going to say that in the modern, modern political arena, I think most people when they think of oligarchs, they think about the people around Putin, these kind of big, almost mafia kind of power players who control Russia's natural resources.But you're saying it's amuch broader thing.You would say that we do have oligarchs in the West.

Oh, absolutely.In fact, I teach a course at Northwestern University called Oligarchs and Elites.On the very first day I taught the course in 2007, a student made a statement, Russia has oligarchs and the United States has rich people.And the student wanted to make it very clear that no, no, no, no, we don't have oligarchs in the US.at that time in 2007, where we had sort of made this definitional detour, where really it was something about one's money having to do with corruption in Russia.That's right.

That has completely changed now.And so in the vocabulary today, we've actually come back to the long -standing definition of what oligarchs is, and I define oligarchy as not a separate political system from democracy.Oligarchy is the politics of wealth defense.

Give us some examples of who are the Western oligarchs, would you say?We know who the Russian ones are, who are the ones in our own societies?

So the first thing I'll say is that there are those who are very prominent and household names, and they are only the tip of the iceberg of who the oligarchs are.And so everybody knows names like Bezos, Soros, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel.There's a long list of names of people that really are household names.And one of the important things to understand right off the bat is that set of names is constantly changing.15 years ago, most of those names were not uttered.And 15 years from now, it's going to be a different set of names.

So we have to think of oligarchs as being both a set of identifiable actors who are quite visible.but also a very large number of people actually down below them who are very influential and are using their wealth power to make sure that oligarchs get outcomes which are very favorable to them.

And I suppose someone listening to this might say, in a way, might reflect your father's observation, which is to say, well, look, it is hardly a novel observation that the rich are powerful and the rich dominate societies.Your father, as you say, not a political man, observed that fundamental truth all those years ago.I suppose what is the more novel observation in your book, it seems to me, is the idea that not only do the rich dominate societies in democracies, but they dominate our society through democracy.The democracy itself, which is to some extent a very old left -wing argument, but the democracy itself embeds the oligarchy and it's designed to do so.It's designed to do so.Now, what brings you to that conclusion?

If we back up to the birth, for example, of our modern democratic era, it happens in the 1780s in the United States.And what a lot of people don't realize is that that moment of actually running to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention was a moment of panic.And the panic was that there was a clash at that moment between oligarchs and oligarchy and democracy in the United States.And the clash was in the form of a debt crisis.Ordinary farmers were indebted.The country was indebted after the war.

And one of the questions that was worked out or struggled over democratically was, who's going to bear the pain of this debt crisis?And by the tens of thousands, these small farmers were being thrown into debtors' prisons forForeclosures in some areas were at a level of 70 % of small farmers.And what happened is, in the states where they got no relief, where democracy was not responsive, they rose up, and especially Massachusetts, and we got Shays' Rebellion.Those two things caused the framers to run to Philadelphia.And the very first thing that Broadway Hamilton said in that convention was, there is an excess of democracy in the United States.

But in what way would you say that modern democracy is designed for oligarchy?Because of course, someone looking at that could say, well, actually, look, look at true oligarchy.True oligarchy is Putin's Russia.And that is certainly not a true democracy.And therefore, if democracy was inherently so useful to oligarchy, surely, actually, Putin's Russia would be a democracy, but it's not.

Right.So it turns out that Putin's Russia is what I call a sultanistic oligarchy.He is a sultanistic oligarch, and he's in charge of the rest of the oligarchs, and he protects them as well as attacks them based on their political behavior.In the case of the United States, let's be clear, the argument is that it is a democracy.And in fact, there's a relationship between struggling over issues like, will women have access to the vote, or on issues of race and so on.democracy actually works.

It's in the vertical sense that in that moment in the convention...

Well, let's just explain that, because that's the distinction you draw in the book, isn't it?Which is between sort of vertical democracy and horizontal democracy.Just explain what you mean by that.

So what I mean by that is that among the non -rich, there are many ways in which people have been excluded, oppressed, marginalized, and so on.And we see a 250 year history of democracy works in the sense thatyou struggle to overcome those kinds of exclusions, and we can see that there are setbacks, yes, and so on, but it actually works.

The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice, as Martin Luther King said.

Yes, in that horizontal sense of the ways in which we as the non -rich sort of oppress each other.And the blind spot, actually, I try to argue is that because democracy works in this horizontal way, we mistakenly think that it will work vertically.along that vertical axis, but it was precisely that vertical axis.

Between the rich and poor.

Between the rich and the poor, and the idea that the many could threaten the few, overwhelm them in a democracy by sheer numbers, that the framers decided they would create institutional safeguards and blocks.So here's what they did.They said, the people will get to vote at the level of the lower chamber, the House.They would not get to vote for the Senate or anything up above that.But that has changed now, which shows that these systems can evolve.It has changed.

But let's just understand that it was set up so that only the wealthy would be a check in the Senate on the House.And then the president got a veto.just in case something got through the House and the Senate, and then the Supreme Court is able to actually nullify the entire democracy below that.

And sure, and we see if we're just talking about the United States, then obviously we see plenty of examples where the sort of democratic wiring, if you like, the scaffolding of American politics has certainly benefited the rich.And you can sort of argue, I suppose, that institutionally it was designed to do that.But I suppose just to push back on some other examples.I mean, let's even take the United States.There have been plenty of examples, haven't there, where presidents and congresses have done things that the oligarchs did not like.The New Deal.

under FDR.Antitrust under Teddy Roosevelt.Even more recently, Affordable Care Act under Obama.You go over to this country or Europe, the great post -war social democratic safety nets that were constructed.The oligarchs wouldn't have liked any of this stuff.So it does show, doesn't it, that democracy can work vertically as well as horizontally.

But it isn't necessarily hardwired, as you argue, always for the oligarchs.

So oligarchs have definitely experienced setbacks.And especially during major crises.So, for example, all of those things you described, the New Deal, the FDR period, and so on, came in the wake of the First World War, the Great Depression, and in the Second World War.So that not only did we see the rise of the New Deal, but by the 1950s, the highest tax bracket that oligarchs faced was in excess of 90%.And so, yes, the argument is that it is possible to actually get some relief some of the time.But what we need to understand is that if oligarchs won all of the time, no one would think that the system was democratic.

They would think that it's completely dominated.And so what has really changed over time?is this, not the presence of oligarchy, but its visibility and the extent to which they win.So let me give you an example.Over the last 50 years, we have seen an absolutely epic explosion in inequality, not just in the United States, but around the world.And this is a reflection, actually, of oligarchic power.

And it's expressed in two ways.One, through the legislatures.And we have a tremendous study that was done in the United States.of congressional decisions.Two political scientists in the United States analyzed 1 ,779 policy decisions at the federal level, and they asked a simple question.When the interest of the rich and the non -rich diverged, how many times on those policy issues did the non -rich majority win?

And the answer was never.That's how strong the influence was.And they do this quantitatively and so on.It's a very, very famous article.What we really need to understand is that how do we explain the fact that we have become more democratic over time, and yet we have become more unequal?And we are not just becoming more unequal.

Liberal democracies today are the most unequal societies ever to have existed.How is that possible, that we would become more empowered and yet we would become dramatically more unequal?

Well it's not part of the answer.Part of it is about economics and part of it is about the way in which our societies, and we're obviously going to potentially see this unfold over the 21st century, the sorts of people who are able to avail of themselves of the productive and industrial changes that we're seeing potentially are narrower and narrower and narrower, more and more educated.And we're seeing that hollowing out of the workforce.So those trends that you described are likely to get worse.How do you as a society managed to, and as a polity, managed to harness the productive power and entrepreneurial power that some of these people have.And we mentioned Musk.

He's clearly a deeply entrepreneurial person, a very ingenious person in all sorts of ways, albeit does not always use his power and money for the good of the rest of mankind.But nonetheless, he is.How do you harness that in the 21st century whilst not ending upsuccumbing to quite crass leveling down policies that we've seen in the past?

Sure.So one of the first questions is, It's not whether we should have absolutely egalitarian societies or the incredibly extreme inequality that we have, but really where would the inequality land in a way that is good for society, but also good for innovation and creativity and all of those things.We happen to be at an extreme right now that is sort of off the charts.That's one point to make.Another is that We have, on the one hand, market outcomes from the work people do, the changes, and the innovations that they introduce, and so on, right?We have that.

But we also have something called progressive taxation, which is a democratic policy.And it was introduced a long time ago.And progressive taxation is basically the fundamental notion that whatever the market outcomes are in society, We can decide democratically that we're going to put very heavy taxation on the ultra wealthy and that we are going to create opportunities for others in society, access to education, and so on and so on.Well, it turns out that progressive taxation has actually been defeated by the oligarchs.And let me give you an example.Starting in the 1950s and 60s, something I called the wealth defense industry emerges.

Because those tax rates were so high coming out of the Second World War, an entire private sector industry of armies of lawyers, accountants, wealth management professionals, lobbyists of all kinds, emerged.And it's a multi -billion dollar industry today.And its sole purpose,is A, to knock down the tax bracket rates in the first place by lobbying the legislative process, and then making sure that oligarchs actually don't pay those taxes or brackets at all.So that many of those names you mentioned pay somewhere between one and three percent.And we have something in the United States called the tax gap.

This is the number which the IRS is required by statute to calculate.And it's the difference between what the IRS confidently believes it should be collecting and what it actually does.Today, per year, the tax gap in the United States is $1 trillion.The defense budget is 900 billion.What they've also shown is that the cheating rate by the average citizen is about 1%.The level at which oligarchs are evading and avoiding their taxes is 55%.

So what does that mean?Democracy says, we want to do something about inequality, and progressive taxation is one of the most important instruments.Oligarchs say, you can't and you won't tax us.And in the end, they keep hundreds of billions of that trillion and make money on that money.And what it does is it supercharges the rate at which we're becoming unequal.

Just finally, Geoffrey, I mean, I suppose the question is what to do about it.You just talked about progressive taxation there.I mean, I suppose we could argue, you could argue, that maybe some of this sounds rather fatalistic.We are living and it seems to me surely if there is going to be a threat we accept this oligarchical presence exist and if there's going to be a threat to it surely if that threatis going to come, it's going to come now.I mean, we're living in a time and we just let's take the democracy or the sort of recent trends in democracy.

What we have is genuine electoral volatility.We've got a population which is generally speaking actually more enthused about politics, less enthused.We've seen repeated democratic shocks, and there certainly is, I think it's fair to say, a kind of electrification of the impulse that your father had all those years ago, which is this sense that, you know, we're getting screwed over, the rich are getting richer, we see the sort of populism that we've seen on left and right.Bernie Sanders, Trump channels some of this stuff, but not enough, you know, we've seen it in our own country as well.Surely, this is a moment ripe for challenging the oligarchy, if someone has the, you know, wherewithal and political now is to do it.

Yeah, you know, the the melding, the fusion of oligarchy and democracy relies on the fact that actually oligarchy is not very visible.If it's not visible, that fusion actually can go on for decades upon decades and over generations.We happen to be in a moment when the population's awareness of the use of wealth power in democracy is at a very high level right now.In fact, we have not had this kind of visibility of oligarchs since the Gilded Age, when they were called robber barons at that time.And what followed after that...And what followed after that was a backlash politics against them.

And it wasn't, you know, there were a lot of rough policies put in place.We are today, first of all, let's note a couple things.One, people are talking about oligarchs in a way that they haven't sort of ever.And that's reflective of the fact that populations are agitated about the role that money is playing in democracy.Also, we are seeing policies being considered that have not been considered in a very long time.For example, not just increasing of taxes, but people are talking very seriously about wealth taxes for the first time.

And it's not just happening in the United States.Europe is in the lead on this.So what we're seeing is an awareness, an of this.And by the way, oligarchs themselves are talking about this with some nervousness, because not all oligarchs are visible and out in front.And so the sheer visibility of this moment, I think, is bringing awareness and change.And it's, we need to see how is this going to play out.

But I would certainly just say, we are at a moment when not only is inequality at epic levels, but people's interpretation of why that's happening is also evolving and changing.And the word oligarchs and oligarchy, those words are in play.

Geoffrey Winters, your book, The Blind Spot, How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies is out now.It's a really fascinating read.I can recommend it.Geoffrey, thanks so much.

Thank you.Pleasure to talk to you.

So to everybody in the UK who rejects that idea, I'd encourage them to just keep on going.It's okay to want to defend your culture.It's okay to want to live in a safe neighborhood.It's okay to want your job to go to yourself and your neighbors and not to a stranger who you don't even know.It is reasonable for the people in Western societies to want to control who comes into their country and who doesn't.A lot of people, frankly, a lot of people in the media

are lower income black and hispanic americans right here in the united states of america and i guarantee that's true in the uk you know what he's right it is absolutely fine to want to defend your culture it is absolutely fine to want to understand who is coming into your country that is jd vance who is nonetheless siding with one tommy robinson after saturday's protest because he believes that tommy robinson represents the best of british values and culture And it remains extraordinary that we are in a sense, and it reflects kind of what we were talking about before, which is how pickled the brains of the Republican Party has become.

That, you know, this is somehow that he has become Robinson.I mean, I found this when we were in Dallas for CPAC.It's disturbing to think, I honestly think Tommy Robinson is the most influential British, I almost hesitate to refer to him this way, political figure in this country.It's not Liz Truss.It's not, you know, Keir Starmer or whatever.For a big part, of the MAGA right, which is basically the right in American politics and the right is in office therefore it's the most powerful bit, genuinely he is almost sort of talismanic and is someone that they literally would listen to the nonsense that he spews and spouts about Britain that they would take as read as opposed to over and above any other British politician or British political figure?

My favourite image actually of the weekend was Tommy Robinson draped in the St George's flag in his protest, surrounded by lots of Shahists, Iranians, draped in their flag, representing the Shah who was sort of marching alongside him.And I just imagine thesort of looks around and goes, what?What?This is about Britain.This is about England.

What are you doing?What are all these foreigners doing?They're like, no, Tommy, we're with you.We're with you all the way.

Well, and this has made me grimly chuckle about the Conservative Party policy at the moment on the Gaza protest versus the Tommy Robinson protest.You ask Conservative shadow ministers about it and they go, you know what?The Gaza protest, they're full of anti -Semites.You're like, yes, we know there have been anti -Semites on them.Wait till you find out about the far right, lads.They were specialising in this before it was called.

I think all in all, if that's your metric, you might want to apply it a little bit more widely.

But isn't it great it all happens on the same day?Yeah, that is handy.

We'll see you tomorrow.Bye bye.

Bye for now.

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