Jen Psaki, Joe Biden's former White House Press Secretary and host of MS NOW's The Briefing with Jen Psaki, talks to Dan about the ways the Trump administration is trying — and failing — to sell its war with Iran to the American people. The two discuss the White House's meme-forward messaging campaign, MAGA media's break with the president over the war, and how Trump's cell phone interview habit is shaping media coverage. Then, Dan and Jen discuss how a series of contentious Senate primaries are reshaping the Democratic Party and whether "fuck Trump" is a strong enough message heading into the midterms.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling book The Population Bomb opens with an apocalyptic paragraph.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” it states. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Professor Ehrlich, who died last week, made a simple argument. The global population was outrunning our capacity to produce enough food to feed everyone. Famine, disease and nuclear Armageddon would follow if the population was not controlled.
The book made him a celebrity, and he regularly spoke in public, warning of the imminent threat to humanity.
Sometimes his warnings were quite vague in terms of the timescale, but other times not - he was reported as saying in 1968 that if current trends continued, by the year 2000, the UK would be a “small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people".
"If I were a gambler," he was quoted as saying, "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000".
But the UK did not collapse, the global death rate did not increase, and we have more food per person now than when he wrote the book.
So, what went wrong with Paul Ehrlich's predictions of a population apocalypse?
If you’ve seen a number or claim that you think More or Less should look at, email moreorless@bbc.co.uk
CONTRIBUTORS
Vincent Geloso, Assistant Professor of economics at George Mason University
Darrell Bricker, global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs and co-author of Empty Planet, the Shock of Global Population Decline
Peter Alexander, Professor of Global Food Systems at the University of Edinburgh
CREDITS:
Presenter: Charlotte McDonald
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Dave O’Neil
Editor: Richard Vadon
Combining binary and triangular interventions, the state coercively taxes citizens to pay for its services, monopolizes certain services, and then is incentivized to engage in paid non-delivery.
Contributing editor Eli Lake joins us on this Friday to discuss the media's emerging quagmire narrative a mere 20 days into the war with Iran and what an American victory will look like, and how the attempts to mollify Iran in the past have led to the current unlikely regional coalition. Plus, how the Middle East conflict impacts the Indo-Pacific region and the Ukraine war.
Naomi Klein saw where our politics was headed before most people on the left. Her 2023 book “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” is hard to describe. But among other things, it traces the new coalitions Klein saw forming on the right, the ways they were co-opting issues long associated with the left, and finding huge audiences and influence outside existing institutions.
The people and coalitions that Klein wrote about run our world now. We are all living in the mirror world. As she put it, it’s “doppelgangers at the wheel.” So I wanted to have Klein on the show to help understand how that happened, what the left failed to see at the time and the lessons the left should take from it now.
As Klein told me: “The thing about doppelgangers is, in literature, they’re always a message telling you a warning: You have to look at yourself. There’s something about yourself that you’re not seeing.”
Note: We recorded this episode before the war in Iran.
The Pentagon requests an additional $200 billion in funding for Trump's war in Iran. Jon and Dan discuss how Democrats in Congress should respond to the request, the administration's insistence that rising gas prices are nothing to worry about, and the resignation of a high-ranking intelligence official, Joe Kent, over the administration's decision to go to war with Iran. Then, they talk about Tulsi Gabbard's and Markwayne Mullin's explosive hearings on the Hill, AIPAC's impact on Tuesday's Democratic primaries in Illinois, and Trump's latest money-making venture — putting himself on a commemorative gold coin. Then, Juliana Stratton, the new Democratic nominee for Senate in Illinois, talks to Dan about her simple, effective anti-Trump message.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
The Pentagon requests an additional $200 billion in funding for Trump's war in Iran. Jon and Dan discuss how Democrats in Congress should respond to the request, the administration's insistence that rising gas prices are nothing to worry about, and the resignation of a high-ranking intelligence official, Joe Kent, over the administration's decision to go to war with Iran. Then, they talk about Tulsi Gabbard's and Markwayne Mullin's explosive hearings on the Hill, AIPAC's impact on Tuesday's Democratic primaries in Illinois, and Trump's latest money-making venture — putting himself on a commemorative gold coin. Then, Juliana Stratton, the new Democratic nominee for Senate in Illinois, talks to Dan about her simple, effective anti-Trump message.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
