Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Dean Baker about the AI stock market bubble for the June 19, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Motley Fool (7/5/25)

Janine Jackson: There’s a lazy host thing where you’re introducing someone who wrote about, say, “freedom,” and you say, “I looked up ‘freedom’ in the dictionary.” But I did go ahead and ask the internet what the stock market is, and I was told that it “operates like a giant, virtual auction house that connects everyday investors who want to sell with investors who want to buy.”

A market bubble, I learned, is a “rapid rise in the price of stocks or other assets that is not justified by fundamentals and is followed by a sharp fall in prices once investor enthusiasm wanes.”

Well, some of us don’t feel comfortable talking about a market that “trades” things like chits, when those things impact human beings having food or shelter or breathable air. But it is a system that we need to understand on its own terms, even as we keep trying to translate them to human needs.

All of these questions are at the surface when we talk about AI and the current market infatuation with it. What exactly is happening? What does it have to do with your life? Does it make sense, even in market-talk?

CEPR (6/15/26)

Here to shed some light on this is Dean Baker. He’s co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He’s author of, among other titles, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. His newest project is called the AI Bubble Monitor, and he joins us now to talk about the what and the why of that. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dean Baker.

Dean Baker: Hi, Janine. Thanks a lot for having me on.

JJ: On AI and the infrastructure around it, it’s the matter-of-factness that kills me: “This is happening, get with it or die mad.” But economic systems are political systems, and choices. We shouldn’t have to just silently accept that certain people are deciding what industry should survive, based not on what people need, but on what some folks say should happen.

So before we get into the specifics, I’d ask you to orient us a little bit here. AI and data centers: A large part of people’s concern is just that it’s come at us so fast and furious. Even if we aren’t economists, we’re not wrong to be concerned about this forced-inevitability vibe, are we? It just doesn’t sound like building a better mousetrap.

Science (10/28/25)

DB: I think for the most part, it’s probably fair to say a lot of the people involved in AI don’t know what they’re doing. And I’m saying that in all seriousness. So we get all these stories about AI models that—you’ve probably heard the term—they “hallucinate.” They make things up. And, again, I shouldn’t assign human characteristics for that; they’re not people. But the point is that they’re ill-designed models.

It’s very problematic to say we’re going to turn things over to AI, and it’s going to do this, it’s going to do that. Because, again, a lot of times, the people designing the systems don’t know what they’re doing. And that should be very troublesome. So we’re getting their spin like, “Oh, we have to move ahead with AI.” And I’m not particularly opposed to moving ahead with AI, but the idea that it has its own dynamic…that, you know, the AI is going to do it for us, or something.

We’re going to decide what we want to—and I’ll come back to who “we” is in a second—but we’re going to have to decide what we want AI to do. And the “we,” as it is now, it’s probably largely Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman. But as a political matter, we need to regulate it. We have to say what it can do, who’s responsible for when it messes up—and I’ll guarantee you it will mess up.

Wired (6/13/26)

There was a case in Germany where they said Google‘s strictly liable for mistakes from its AI. If its AI gives you wrong answers, and that causes people to do things that mess up, Google‘s responsible. I think that’s a great ruling. It should be very clear. That’s wonderful. Anthropic, whoever, whichever big AI company, they designed the model, doesn’t work right? Well, great. You pay the cost, Anthropic. You pay the cost, Google.

But these are rules that we have to put in place, and we’ve kind of gone the other way. So I was just reading that, I believe it was in Mississippi, that the Trump administration is saying, “Oh yeah, environmental regulation’s great, but we have AI. So that doesn’t apply here, because it’s national security.” And I understand Trump doesn’t care much about the law, but you don’t throw your laws in the garbage because “AI”; that literally is just nonsense.

New York Times (6/10/26)

JJ: Right. Well, let’s get into some particulars here. “Riding High After IPO, SpaceX Will Buy AI Startup for $60 Billion.” This is all the New York Times: “Elon Musk’s newly listed rocket maker has become one of the world’s most valuable companies.” Also, it “could turn 4,400 employees into millionaires”; also, “Want to invest in SpaceX? Here’s what to know.” I got all of this from the New York Times. It seems like there’s a lot of confetti flying around the SpaceX IPO. How grounded is that, and how meaningful is that in this conversation?

DB: SpaceX, the market capitalization, this is just incredible. I think we’re up to $2.7, $2.8 trillion. I just looked at the market today, somewhere around there. It’s going up a lot. This is an incredible amount of money, $2.7 trillion, it’s almost 10% of GDP, and it’s just incredible.

CEPR (5/23/26)

And the other side of that: When we talk about stocks, you usually look at the price of the stock relative to corporate earnings, and 20:1, that ratio would be high, but reasonable. So if you tell me a normal company, its stock price is $100, and its annual earnings after taxes are $5, eh, makes sense, without looking more carefully at what the company’s doing, what its progress is, whatever.

OK, we have $2.7 trillion. So you go, well, let’s see, 20 times annual earnings. So annual earnings must be somewhere in the neighborhood of $130 billion a year. Uh, no, it loses money. It’s never made money. SpaceX has never made money.

So people are placing a bet on this company turning around from losing money to being incredibly profitable. I just backed out some numbers, because it’s not going to turn around tomorrow. You go 10 years out, you would have to have profits that are equal to about 20% of all US after-tax corporate profits. No company has ever come close to that.

New Republic (3/17/26)

So, OK, why would someone think that? You go, well, Elon Musk. Well, Elon Musk lies all the time. He said 20 million dead people are getting Social Security. Total fantasy. Some number of dead people get Social Security, probably a thousand, 2,000, 3,000; not everyone who dies gets removed from the rolls. They’re actually pretty good about that, but they’re sure not 20 million, nothing close to 20 million.

He lies all the time. He was running DOGE; he was going to save $2 trillion from the federal budget. He didn’t save anything. So, I mean, I could go on. The guy literally lies all the time.

He’s a neo-Nazi. We all saw his Nazi salute at the Republican Convention. He writes this. I mean, I’m not looking for things to trash him on. He says it. He says there are too many Black people, and brown people, the great replacement. So this is who the guy is.

You go, OK, well, what about his businesses? Well, his businesses haven’t done so well. Tesla’s worth a lot of money. If you look at its stock, its profits are very low, and most of its profits actually come from selling carbon credits, which is a green transition policy that his friend Donald Trump wants to get rid of.

He’s invested big in something he calls the Boring Company, that was supposed to have high-speed transit between major cities. It goes nowhere. It’s been a total bomb. I could go on.

He does not have a great track record in business. He lies all the time. So people are betting $2.7 trillion on him turning around this massive money-loser into some enormous money-maker, and that’s very hard to see. Could happen, things happen, but it’s very hard to see that.

New York Times (6/12/26)

JJ: It’s very hard to see. And I want to stick with this just for a second, because I very much appreciate the way that you connect issues. We have, for example, the Congressional Budget Office and other folks saying, “Hey, this is going to happen. Economic growth is going to be sky high,” based on this kind of thinking. And at the same time, out of the other side of their mouths, folks like Jason Furman, economic advisor under Clinton and Obama, are saying, “Social Security is facing disaster,” and these things don’t add up. They add up politically, but they don’t add up economically. Talk about that connection there.

DB: Yeah. Well, to be fair, Congressional Budget Office, they actually don’t say that.

JJ: Ok.

DB: They project very modest growth over the next decade, somewhere around 2% a year. And if you carry that through, it’s really pretty much impossible to see these stocks—we’re talking about SpaceX, but you have Nvidia, you have Alphabet, we’re going to see initial public offerings, I don’t know the exact time, very soon, from Anthropic, the big AI company, OpenAI. It’s basically impossible to see how those stock prices can make sense. You’d have to have way more rapid growth than what they’re assuming.

And the point I was making that you’re referring to, on Jason Furman and Social Security: If we have that rapid growth, in other words, if these bubble prices make sense, and I don’t mean exactly, but if it’s somewhere in the ballpark, if it’s $2.7 trillion, if it’s anywhere close to making sense, and the price of the other big AI companies, if those are anywhere close to making sense, we’re going to see way more growth than what the Congressional Budget Office, what the Social Security trustees, what’s being projected for these programs. And if we actually get those growths, the idea that we should be at all worried about paying Social Security benefits is close to crazy.

Now, I would argue we’d be close to crazy to be worried about it anyhow, because we can afford paying Social Security benefits. I’ve gone on about that at great length, probably on your show other times, but certainly, if we have anything like the growth that would be implied by these incredible stock valuations, then Social Security is such a non-problem that it’s not worth taking a minute to even talk about paying for it.

New York Times (6/11/26)

JJ: And that’s why I appreciate you’re putting those things together, because I think news media often, they’re on different pages of the paper. And I guess I would say, also, like you’re talking about Musk saying he was going to cut trillions of dollars of waste from the government, when that was just categorically absurd, and isn’t that a place for reporting, to just say, “Whatever you want to think about him, those numbers are absurd”?

DB: Yeah. And I think they have calmed down a lot. I mean, there have been some decent articles. I’m not going to say there’s been no reporting. But basically, Musk is saying utter nonsense, and it’s kind of like if we found someone on the street drunk, and they started rattling off, “Elvis Presley is still alive,” and God knows what else. And they just reported that: “Well, so and so says that Elvis Presley is still alive. Maybe he is. I don’t know.” They’re of that nature.

And, again, actually, I had mentioned this in the piece, because I didn’t know Musk had said exactly this, but I was just playing around; why not Google it? So it turns out, even as Musk is saying, “Oh yes, AI is going to be all this wonderful stuff, and we’ll have incredibly rapid growth and affluence.” He just said, earlier this year, “There’s a thousand percent chance the US government will go bankrupt.”

How could those two go together? If we’re going to have this incredible growth, then there’s no plausible—I mean, it’s not plausible to say the government’s going to go bankrupt anyhow, for reasons I could go into, but it certainly isn’t going to go bankrupt if we’re going to have this incredible growth that Musk is telling us about, with his great AI companies.

JJ: It’s so confusing, and I think as a reader, as just a regular person, you think, “I must not understand this. ” Once I’m already at a thousand percent, I’m like, “Wait, I was in fifth grade. I don’t know how we get to a thousand percent.” But one thing I did want to say is so much of it is about futures, is about the betting aspect of the stock market.

And it’s not about a company making money now because it’s providing a service that people want now. It’s the idea that in the future this is going to work out. And then the same people who say, “I’m investing in this company because it’s going to do something,” they then are the ones who get to set the terms and the terrain of whether that actually happens. And I think that’s why a lot of people feel like it’s kind of just a scheme that doesn’t include them, and that doesn’t have a foot in real life.

Dean Baker (image: BillMoyers.com): “These are all based on future bets that are, at best, very, very shaky, if not altogether absurd. But in the present, it gives them enormous power.” 

DB: Yeah, well, these are all based on future bets that are, at best, very, very shaky, if not altogether absurd. But in the present, it gives them enormous power. I mean, it’s unbelievable. Here’s Elon Musk. His net worth is certainly well over a trillion now. I mean, people are making a big deal he’s at a trillion, but it might be $1.2, $1.3, something like that. It gives them enormous power. You mentioned him buying up another company for $60 billion. Where are they getting the $60 billion? Well, from SpaceX.

And there’s actually precedent for this. So again, people might think, well, Musk is incredibly rich. Someone, I’m stealing this line from someone, “If you’re so rich, how come you’re not smart?” And I think that applies perfectly for Elon Musk, but there’s precedent. We had the stock bubble in the ’90s, we had the housing bubble in the ’00s, and yet a lot of really rich people, who were supposed to be smart, I have no idea how smart or stupid they were, but they invested in really, really stupid things.

So mortgages, going back to the housing bubble, I remember arguing with economists, and they were saying, “Oh, it was old-fashioned to think we needed collateral on loans, and we had to make sure that people could pay them back. Well, now we have all this new technology.” Well, guess what, you did need that.

In the prior decade, with the tech bubble, one of the amazing stories—people could look it up, because they might think I’m saying utter nonsense—Time Warner was one of the biggest, might have been the biggest, media company in the world; it basically sold itself for nothing. It sold itself for AOL stock, and AOL stock plummeted the next year. So it had been worth a lot of money; the next year, it was worth almost nothing. So here you had the biggest media company in the world, or one of the biggest, if it wasn’t absolutely the biggest, and they gave away all their stock to a company that was pretty much worthless a year later.

So you have ostensibly smart people that are very wealthy, and they do really stupid things. I think that’s likely the story of what we’re seeing with this AI bubble. They get a lot of people—again, I don’t do intelligence testing, but ostensibly, they’re supposed to be smart, and looks like they’re doing some really dumb things.

CEPR (5/18/26)

JJ: And then we know that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled, right? So, yes, this is rich people betting against one another, and maybe something won’t pan out, and that’s an “oopsie” for them, but it can mean something much more for a lot of other people.

What do we understand can happen? And I know you’re not trying to predict a time of a bubble bursting; it’s not a prediction. But what does history tell us can happen when bubbles like this do, in fact, burst?

DB: Well, it’s almost always a very bad story. So we had the tech bubble bursting in 2000. We got a recession that was pretty bad, from the standpoint of the labor market. We had no job creation from 2001 to 2005. We hadn’t seen that since the Great Depression—which also, I should say, was started by a bubble bursting, a stock bubble bursting.

And the worst bubble, at least certainly in my lifetime, or recent memory, was the housing bubble collapse in 2008, 2009, 2010, which caused massive unemployment, and millions of people lost their homes. So that’s a pretty bad story.

So we can say, and I’m happy to see Elon Musk lose much of his wealth, which would happen, but he’s still going to be incredibly rich. If he loses 90% of his wealth, he’s going to have more money than any of us will ever see, but you’re going to see a lot of people pay a really big price for that. To be clear, I think it’d be great if the bubble would burst tomorrow, the sooner the better, but it’s not going to be a pretty story.

JJ: And let’s come back to journalism just for a minute, because the things that you’ve just said to me, I’m not saying I’m not seeing any critical reporting or thoughtful reporting, certainly I am, but I’m seeing a lot of, “Hey, this is happening. How can I get in on it?” Or just, “Isn’t it OK that these people are in charge of everything?” And I just wonder, what would actual critical reporting include, day to day, that would help us understand this better?

DB: I think certainly trying to put the pieces together, as we just did, talking about, well, if these prices make sense, then we’re going to have way more rapid growth. And that’s just a fact. I mean, that’s not my personal opinion. You can’t tell a story where Elon Musk’s wealth, his market capitalization of SpaceX and the other companies, make sense, and the growth projections we’re looking at from the Congressional Budget Office make sense. Those are contradictory.

So I think it’d be helpful if, when they talk about one, they talk about the other, saying, these prices, unless we see way more rapid growth than is being projected for budget purposes and other purposes, they don’t make sense. And vice versa, say that, oh, Jason Furman—Jason’s not a bad guy—he was out there in the New York Times, [saying] we should worry about Social Security and our children. Well, if the AI stories are right, we don’t have to worry at all.

Again, I don’t think we should worry about it, even if they weren’t right, but if they are right, it’s just Looney Tunes stuff. It’s like we’re worried we don’t have enough water when we’re in the middle of Lake Michigan.

So just putting the pieces together, that should be a standard part of reporting, just to remind people, put the context in there. And, again, it doesn’t take a long time. They’re really not disputable points, so I’m not saying something about Jason here; I know him, he’s not a stupid guy. He’d go, “Yeah, of course that’s true.” I suspect he would agree that AI, these prices don’t make sense, but he would agree, if they made sense, then we’re going to see way more rapid growth. Those go together.

So putting that into the stories, putting the context in there, so people can understand, because, again, this is something I harped on, you guys have harped on this, that you talk about these things, a typical person, even someone who’s more educated, and they spend time, they don’t know all these things. I mean, they might know them in some sense, but it’s not right in front of them. So they need to have it put there, when they’re reading about AI, or they’re reading about the budget, see how these things relate to each other.

AI Bubble Monitor (6/22/26)

JJ: Well, OK. The AI Bubble Monitor, your new project, I want to say the real-timeness of it, because maybe less so than with the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble, but we do know that pundits and folks are going to say, “No one saw it coming. We didn’t know what was happening. We all thought….” So for me, a big part of the meaning of your new project is just that it is existing in real time.

DB: Yeah, that’s the idea. We want to get the information out there, and I’m trying to put down real information, if people think that it still makes sense. Again, I’m not going to put in anything that I’m not pretty confident is true, I’m getting it all from reliable sources or, again, I’m not making them up, they’re from the industry, from government data. And, again, if you want to say, “Oh yeah, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, OK, it’s getting 20% of after-tax corporate profits,” Again, I can’t say it’s impossible. I wouldn’t put my money on that, but that’s what you’re doing if you’re buying up SpaceX.

JJ: It could happen, yep. But the idea is that you’re watching it in real time, and asking questions in real time, so no one can say these questions weren’t asked, or nobody was thinking about it.

DB: Yes, exactly.

JJ: Finally, when we talked last time, probably when we talk every time, we say that we want journalists to separate people and systems. It’s not enough to say Elon Musk is weird, or Trump is weird, without naming the structures that they are able to use to enact their ideas. Otherwise, how do we know what needs to change besides the president, right? So there are structures and systems that we should also be asking questions about.

NextShark (1/26/26)

DB: Yeah. And you guys are obviously right in the middle of this. And I think the media, and particularly when we talk about Elon Musk, it’s very much that, because the guy owns X, I don’t know where that stands. It had been, I think, the largest social media site; I’m sure it’s no longer true, I know the users are down. But we create a media infrastructure that has an enormous impact on what politics looks like, and what issues get called attention to, and how those are covered.

And that was never great. I mean, we both have been in this game a long time. It was never great. So I’m not going to say we had the good old days, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, but it’s gotten a lot worse.

And when you have Larry Ellison as a Trumper who—I guess it’s his kid, actually, David Ellison, that owns CBS, and now they’re looking to take over Warner Brothers, which would give them control of CNN. These are really big issues, because this matters in terms of how people see the world, because they need information and those are sources of information for an awful lot of people, and people need to be aware of who owns the media, and how that affects basically everything, but certainly politics.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with economist Dean Baker. His new project, AI Bubble Monitor, can be found on the website of the Center for Economic and Policy Research; that’s CEPR.net. Thank you so much, Dean Baker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DB: Thanks, Janine. I really appreciate being on.

The New York Times story (6/16/26) reported that the Senatobia Police Department said it ” encountered two people and a child ‘fleeing from the store into a vehicle.'” The one-year-old was “fleeing”?

“One-Year-Old Boy Killed After Officer Fires at Vehicle in Mississippi,” said the New York Times headline (6/16/26). So, a “one-year-old boy”—what most people would call a baby—was “killed after” a police officer fired at a vehicle, but there’s no verb you could use to connect those two things?

The Times subhed continued that pacifying work:

It is not entirely clear what led up to the shooting, but the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said that police officers were responding to a shoplifting call.

“Ohh, shoplifting…!” we’re evidently supposed to say, before turning the page; that might make the baby murder make sense. I don’t need to say that baby was Black.

There will be more coverage of this heartbreaking, infuriating news about cops in Senatobia, Mississippi, called to the five-alarm crisis of someone purportedly shoplifting diapers, opening fire into a car whose driver “allegedly drove toward them.”

But in the meantime, please think hard about reporting that tells you to calm down, that suggests that, just maybe, nothing wrong happened at all. As ABC News (6/18/26) put it in a piece on how the “officer involved in shooting outside Walmart that killed 1-year-old boy” has been placed on leave: “One-year-old Kohen Wiley was killed, according to the family’s attorney.”

So maybe he’s not dead? Or he died from something other than the gun of the “involved officer”? Caution in reporting is valuable, but when it’s mainly deployed to protect the inflicters of state violence (FAIR.org, 7/11/16), you have to ask if it’s really a principle at all.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

CEPR (6/15/26)

This week on CounterSpin: The way we hear about the stock market is quite different from the vision many people still hold: that businesses strive to serve people’s real needs or desires, and investors are rewarded by that metric—not by convincing people that they might make a lot of money in the future, or by conspiring with powerful entities to ensure that shareholders profit, by whatever means.

This longstanding confusion and conflict are being showcased right now in the unasked-for push of artificial intelligence into so many aspects of our lives, and the aggressive build-out of energy-gobbling data centers to serve it—whether communities want them or not.

Now, questions are arising around whether the promises of endless growth of the AI industry actually make any sense. Is there an AI bubble? How would we know? And what happens, and to whom, when it bursts?

A new project engages questions, not just about price-to-earnings ratios, and historical comparisons, but about the predictable impacts—on, for example, workers’ retirement accounts—when the AI exuberance falls to earth.

Dean Baker is co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the force behind their new project, called the AI Bubble Monitor. He joins us this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at some recent press coverage of the 2026 congressional primaries.

The New York Times‘ original headline was “These Are the Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails.” The revised headline (6/16/26)—evoking a 1970s-era British domestic drama—casts  Black voters in the role of servants.

Ten years ago, New York Times political thinker Thomas Edsall (6/1/16; FAIR.org, 6/5/16) was blaming Trumpism on

the refusal of Democrats and the American left to hear—or to grant some legitimacy to—the grievances of white America as it loses power and stature to ascendant minorities and to waves of immigrants from across the globe.

Now, though, Edsall (New York Times, 6/16/26) says that “the racial and ideological split in the Democratic Party has been flipped on its head.” Now the voters he wants Democrats to listen to are no longer white:

White, well-educated liberals are the leading proponents of cultural and identity policies that often alienate swing middle-class voters. Black and other minority Democrats are a strong force for moderation.

These are the voters, as the piece’s original headline put it, who “can keep Democrats from going off the rails.”

As evidence for this, Edsall cites polling suggesting that Black (and “other minority”) voters are more concerned about “the situation at the border,” more likely to believe that gender “is determined by sex assigned at birth,” and less likely to support “cutting some funding from police departments in your community and shifting it to social services.”

As it happens, these issues—immigration, gender identity, policing—are the same issues the New York Times has long pushed to warn readers away from the left (FAIR.org, 5/24/21, 5/6/21, 4/24/23). But do such issues have an impact on real-world elections?

Edsall offers Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute, a “centrist Democratic think tank,” to assure us that they do:

In the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina, Black Americans famously supported Joe Biden over socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2025, New York City’s Black voters supported Andrew Cuomo over socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary. And in the 2026 Democratic primary for mayor in DC, socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George leads among white voters by 25 points, while the mainstream Democrat Kenyan R. McDuffie leads among Black voters by five points.

So Black voters lean to the right, and therefore can be counted on as a bulwark against socialist politicians? That’s good news for the Progressive Policy Institute—a deceptively named ideology mill bankrolled by ExxonMobil, PhRMA, AT&T and the like—as well as for Edsall, a staunch opponent of appealing to working-class voters’ economic interests (FAIR.org, 6/23/17, 3/30/18).

The Cato Institute (9/26/19) found that African Americans had the most positive views of socialism and most negative views of capitalism out of four demographic groups.

But wait—if we want to know what Black voters think about socialism, why don’t we ask them? That’s what the Cato Institute (9/26/19), the libertarian think tank, did; it found that 62% of Black respondents viewed socialism favorably, as opposed to 36% of white respondents.

The same survey found that 64% of Democrats as a whole had a positive view of socialism–making it unlikely that white Democrats have a substantially more favorable take on socialism than their Black counterparts.

Yet Edsall quotes another representative from the Progressive Policy Institute, founder Will Marshall, declaring:

The nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in US politics…. They aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.

But, laments Edsall:

The problem for Marshall and others who would like to shift power within the Democratic Party from liberal white elites to more moderate constituencies is that the white elites hold power and won’t give it up without a fight.

It’s a nice trick: portraying proponents of policies that benefit the working class as “white elites.” Meanwhile, actual white elites are paying the Progressive Policy Institute to dress up the defense of their wealth in blackface.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

Free Press (6/5/26)

Janine Jackson: Many ideas are being tested right now in the US; what the First Amendment actually means and does is one of them.

There is a horror show happening at—but not only at—Delaney Hall, a prison labeled “detention center” in New Jersey, where, as CounterSpin listeners likely know, hundreds of people have been on hunger strike to protest the conditions they’re subjected to, as they presumably await adjudication, and where reporters and protesters seeking to shed light on the situation have been met, not with legal arguments or explanation, but with pepper spray and rubber bullets.

The story isn’t about the failure of journalism itself; it’s more about the actual nature and meaning of the job, and why it needed a constitutional amendment to protect it.

Vanessa Maria Graber is the senior director of journalism and media education at the group Free Press. She joins us now by phone from Philadelphia. Welcome to CounterSpin, Vanessa Maria Graber.

Vanessa Maria Graber: Thank you so much for having me here.

JJ: I really just wanted to ask you to tell us about what you’ve been seeing at Delaney Hall that’s important about reporting and organizing, and that relationship. What can we be taking away from this absolute nightmare about the role of frontline journalism?

Free Press (1/26/26)

VMG: So at Free Press, because we care very much about defending First Amendment rights, and press freedom of journalists, we’ve had our eye on places like Delaney Hall, and Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and many of the protests that are happening outside detention centers across the US. And, unfortunately, we’ve had to pay close attention, because many journalists and protesters’ First Amendment rights are being violated.

Protesters have a right to assemble in public places—peacefully, nonviolently, which they have been doing—and they have been met with violence, and not allowed to protest. Their right to draw attention to some of the abuses that are happening in these detention centers has been violated.

The press also has a right to cover these issues, to cover these stories, to find out where detainees are being taken, and what’s happening inside the center. And they’ve also been met with violence and arrest.

And so we’ve been incredibly concerned about what has been happening at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. We have been working in New Jersey for more than 10 years, trying to get more access to the media, but especially for communities that don’t have a lot of access to information, like immigrant communities and Spanish-speaking communities.

And so what we’ve been seeing in the course of more than a year is immigrant journalists really be on the front lines of the story, not just reporting on these protests, but really trying to amplify the larger story of the human rights abuses happening inside Delaney Hall. So drawing attention to the medical neglect; for detainees being forced to work for a dollar a day; being inside there under overcrowded, unsanitary conditions; being forced to eat rotten food.

New Jersey Monitor (5/22/26)

They have been being arrested, they’ve been put under curfew, they’ve been put in a “protest zone,” in a public area where they’re allowed to protest, and journalists who have been clearly identified, some of whom are with major media networks, not that should make any difference, but they’ve also been brutally attacked by the New Jersey State Police and by ICE agents, and some of them were detained under the same brutal conditions that many immigrants are facing.

And so once they got detained, that’s finally when they were able to get access, and see what it’s like for the many immigrant families that are inside detention centers like that. And so it is incredibly concerning to see those protesters, legal observers and journalists be hit with rubber bullets, tear gas, smoke grenades, pepper-sprayed. And some of the pictures and video and reports that we’re seeing are very, very alarming.

JJ: It’s beyond alarming. And then I guess, you know, some of the reporters who are trying to shed light there are from major media organizations, but I would say, this is a four-alarm fire that you would hope that any media organization would be talking about, would be screaming about, would be fighting for things to change.

What we’re seeing, instead—and this is part of the story—is folks who are saying, “Well, I didn’t think I was a journalist, but it turns out I am, because I’m trying to shed light on this. ” And so we’re kind of seeing a defining of what it means to commit acts of journalism, and it turns out it doesn’t mean that you have to come from a well-funded legacy organization. You just have to have a particular kind of job in mind.

Vanessa Maria Graber: “To provide the critical information that’s necessary to keep people safe, organizers and citizen journalists have assumed the role of journalists.”

VMG: Yeah. What people need to understand, especially in immigrant communities, Spanish-speaking communities, is that these corporate media outlets do not serve them. Their messages do not reach these communities.

And so in order to fill the gaps, in order to provide the critical information that’s necessary to keep people safe, organizers and citizen journalists have assumed the role of journalists, to be able to bring that information to these communities that are not being served.

And so that’s why you see so many people affiliated with organizing groups or immigrants rights organizations be doing these livestreams, and using social media and using apps like WhatsApp, in order to tell people what’s happening, and to be able to try to bring news about family members that are inside that detention center.

And, really, they’ve been raising the alarm about these conditions way before corporate media got a hold of the story. Violence had to break out at Delaney Hall before that story rose to the national level. But for many, many months before that, this was a crisis point among immigrants across New Jersey, who not only were trying to advocate on behalf of the families, by raising awareness about this, but also trying to provide information to keep people out of there, as the ICE raids continue across states like New Jersey.

These folks are not just covering the protests outside there, but they’re also having to give people information about how to know their rights, how to exert their rights, how to stay safe in their communities and how to access legal resources. And that’s a job that mainstream corporate media have never done.

Radio Jornalera NJ

JJ: Let me ask you, finally, these folks need help. They need public support, they need more eyes, they need more people paying attention. How can people plug in to the work that’s happening? I know there’s a call from organizers to say, “Hey, help us do this work that we’re doing.” What can folks do?

VMG: I think the biggest thing they can do is repost, reshare some of these livestreams and photographs and videos that are being reported. I think it’s fine to repost “legitimate journalists,” although they’re under some real editorial constraints. So I think it’s even more important to amplify the truthtellers, many of whom are immigrants’ rights organizers and people from other social justice groups who are livestreaming daily.

Radio CATA

And there’s actually a network of immigrants rights groups working together to share livestreams in order to reach the most people. So groups like El Pueblo Unido de Atlantic City, CATA, Cosecha, Radio Jornalera, South Jersey Solidarity Collective—they’re all working really hard to let people know what’s going on, and urging people to contact the governor. Certainly, if you don’t have social media, and you’re listening to the radio right now, tune in to their radio station; CATA has a low-power FM station. And certainly you can volunteer, you can give money and you can make your voice heard through the legislators who are responsible with oversight for places like these.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Vanessa Maria Graber. You can find her piece, “First on the Scene at Delaney Hall,” at PressingIssues.org. Vanessa Maria Graber, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VMG: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks, Janine.

Janine Jackson interviewed Detention Watch Network’s Silky Shah about ICE detention protests for the June 12, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Truthout (6/15/26)

Janine Jackson: You may have heard about the New Jersey detention center Delaney Hall, where people inside are on a hunger strike in protest of their conditions, and people outside are demanding access and accountability. What’s happening inside and outside of Delaney Hall is absolutely a story, but it’s also a way into a much bigger, broader story that did not start a month or a year or even five years ago.

Joining us now to add context to our current and fully appropriate outrage is Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Silky Shah.

Silky Shah: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here with you.

JJ: Well, if I just go to your start page, I see:

Many people are shocked to learn that the US government systematically deprives the liberty of immigrants, refugees and people seeking asylum, creating a system of immigration detention, the largest detention system in the world.

I feel like that already has a thousand stories within it. The shock that people might feel, the systemic nature of the injury, and then just the fact that what we’re told is a legal system in fact operates unjustly and inhumanely.

It’s June 11, 2026. What do you want people to see, to understand and to do, in the face of this crisis around detention?

Brennan Center (2/24/26)

SS: It’s a really hard time. In my 20-plus years of organizing against immigration detention, I couldn’t have imagined it getting as bad as we’re seeing now, in terms of both the scale of how big it’s gotten, and also the violence that’s taking place inside.

And the conditions have always been bad in immigration detention. That is just always the case when you put people in these types of settings. And, again, there’s so much inhumanity to the way immigrants are treated in ICE custody, in detention generally. But in this context, where you have the federal government saying that this is not a place where we’re going to have any oversight, this is a place where there’s less ability to monitor and understand what’s going on, that means it’s just getting that much more severe.

So we’ve gotten to this last year, more than 60,000 or 70,000 people detained at any given time, more than half a million people going through the system, people spending longer times in detention.

And with the hunger strikes happening right now, honestly, it was just a matter of time. I mean, this is a very common thing that happens in immigration detention. In previous iterations, for many, many years, we’ve seen this be a way for people in detention to exercise their agency and say, “No, we shouldn’t be treated like this, and also we should be released.” And so I think, from my perspective, seeing what’s happened at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, or Adelanto in California, or a number of other detention centers around the country this last few weeks, I think it’s a culmination of this last year and a half, of how much more violent and massive the system has gotten.

JJ: I think there’s a confusion around the very concept of detention, because I think people think, at least based on big media stories, “Well, these people are in prison. I’m sorry if they don’t like the food.”

But detention isn’t supposed to be prison. These are not people who have been even accused or convicted of any crime. It’s this liminal, in-between space that has been taken over by a carceral mindset and understanding.

But I think for folks reading in the paper, they think, “Oh, well, this is part of the legal process.” And once they prove that they’re legal, somehow this will erase this experience. It’s a kind of weird netherworld that I don’t feel that is very well understood.

Silky Shah: “The narrative has become about immigration being a public safety issue or a national security issue, when in fact immigration is about family relationships…. And it’s about seeking refuge.”

SS: Yeah. I do think it’s very confusing to people. I think part of it is because detention is a place where people have so few rights, it’s become a testing ground for the authoritarianism of this administration, which we’ve seen with the detention of international students last year, and their protests around solidarity with Palestine, or offshoring of detention we’ve seen in El Salvador and other places.

The thing I’ll say about the immigration detention system, as it relates to the larger prison industrial complex we have, is that it exists because of that. And so the US is a country, as you said, it has the largest detention system in the world. It also has the largest prison systems in the world, and it’s a place that’s really deeply committed to punishment, and these carceral infrastructures, and the immigration enforcement apparatus that we have today really grew out of that. It’s about policing, it’s about incarceration, and fascism operates through law enforcement in these sort of tools.

And so the reality is people in detention are not there serving a sentence for a crime, they’re there waiting a hearing on their deportation case or immigration case, or appeal on their case, or they’re awaiting deportation. But all detention centers, pretty much the vast majority are either former state or federal prisons or existing county jails. So they are carceral infrastructure.

And even then, on this question of whether people deserve it or not, based on their relationship to the criminal legal system, I think we have to really have a reckoning, and as we did five, six years ago, during the summer of 2020 and beyond, with the scale of incarceration in this country, and how many more people are funneled into the system, more and more, with harsher laws, higher bails, all those things.

The same thing is happening with immigration detention, and this sort of narrative for years, where we just accepted that some people were deserving of this. So under the Obama years, it was very much like, there are good immigrants and there are bad immigrants, and we’re going to go after the bad immigrants, and that’s going to help us make the case for the good ones. That just fueled the far right to target more and more immigrants overall.

Guardian (6/10/26)

And similarly, under Biden, there were a lot of questions about people newly arriving at the border, and it became the old immigrant versus the new immigrant. And, again, because the Democrats didn’t really fight back against these narratives, that again fueled the right, and fueled this push towards enforcement, and that’s what’s got us to this place. I think we have to fight for everyone, regardless of why they are inside.

JJ: And have that bigger vision.

SS: Absolutely.

JJ: We hear about, “Well, if you did it the right way,” OK, but then you also hear this administration wants to, and is, simply stripping citizenship from people who did it the “right way.” So, in other words, it’s not a matter of filing the right papers, because if it’s decided that this administration doesn’t want you, that legal, that paper-pushing, that processing—it turns out that is not actually the deciding factor. This whole idea of just “do it right and you’ll be safe,” that’s exploded.

SS: What’s so hard about those conversations is that they’re happening in a vacuum, when we have to really understand that immigration is connected to so much more than just this very specific process. I think one of the big challenges is that so much of the narrative has become about immigration being a public safety issue or a national security issue, when in fact immigration is about family relationships. In so many ways, that’s the real question of how these decisions around immigration are decided.

And it’s about seeking refuge. And so there can be this perspective of this very process that is actually not something that actually allows people to seek safety, or seek opportunity, or the other things that people might want by migrating to the US, and it ignores the foreign policy implications, the root causes of migration, that have created the conditions where people are seeking safety in the US.

FAIR.org (5/24/21)

JJ: The very framing of immigration as a problem, or the “border” as a “crisis,” this is already a framing that sets people up to hear things in a certain way, which, I don’t know if folks remember, this wasn’t the way we talked about people coming to the United States as recently as 15 years ago. So folks are being sold a particular storyline about where their problems come from, and it has a lot to do with news media, I think. It has a lot to do with the story that politicians, amplified by the media, are selling folks.

And I wonder, how do you think we can reframe that? Certainly we see pushback, certainly we see resistance to this idea. But what deeper do you think needs to happen?

SS: The reality is that politicians generally use immigrants as scapegoats, to see [them as] this place to put all the country’s problems on, when actually a lot of it is a failure to meet the needs of everyday Americans in so many ways. Especially leading up to the 2024 election, so many of the narratives were around the lack of social safety nets, what people needed, especially in the post-pandemic environment, and then immigrants arriving. And so immigrants became this really, really easy scapegoat for the right. And again, I do think that the Democrats failed to put forward a pro-immigrant message, and understand that immigrants are part of the fabric of the US in every single way.

NPR (6/10/26)

I would say that part of this is really tackling those questions about where we choose to put our resources. So just this week, Congress passed the new reconciliation money for immigration enforcement, for ICE, at $70 billion. Last summer, we also saw $170 billion go to immigration enforcement, which means more infrastructure, expansion of detention; They’re trying to have these large, thousand-bed warehouses in parts of the country to hold people in detention. They’ve expanded ICE agents to more than 20,000 agents; it’s essentially Trump’s occupying army at this point.

And that’s where the money is going. And often there’s a scarcity mindset, that we can’t have the resources to have Medicare for All or SNAP or all the other benefits that people deserve in education, nutrition, etc. And in so many ways, when you’re looking at how much money is going to these systems of control, these systems of violence, and being stripped from these other parts of society that are really needing it, I think that’s where we can start to tackle this question of, let’s stop scapegoating immigrants, let’s make sure to really talk about what the needs are. And I think people are starting to make those connections.

JJ: Let me just follow up on that, finally, because I do see hope. I feel very sad and angry and scared, but I see hope in people getting out of bed, and going to Delaney Hall, and raising their voices and protesting, and they’re putting themselves in harm’s way. And I just think, the support for those people who are connecting those dots, even if you’re sitting at home, is part of what you can do. How do you talk to people who say, “I want to help. I want to plug in. I just don’t know what to do”?

Truthout (1/22/26)

SS: There’s so many things people can do. I think, again, supporting people who are hunger-striking inside. Detention is across the country; there’s likely a detention center near you. Finding the community that’s working to support people inside to help get them released; the big goal right now with the hunger strikes is get people out.

We have to do the work to protect our communities now. So the incredible work that happened in Minneapolis, for instance, and all these other places around, ICE Watch campaigns, making sure people don’t end up in the system in the first place, being really attuned to what’s happening in your community and your neighborhood.

And then more broadly, unfortunately, we just lost on this vote around the $70 billion, but I do think, generally, there’s so much that Congress plays a role in, in terms of resourcing the system, and also these longer-term questions about how do we change the system. And so calling your members of Congress, things like the MELT ICE Act, and other efforts to shift the system, eventually.

I think, locally, a lot of work is happening to stop detention expansion. We have a lot of resources on our website at DetentionWatchNetwork.org, and a lot of work at state legislatures. New York just passed a bill against immigration detention. It is a time where the levers of power are limited, but there is some opportunity, especially at the state and local level.

So finding your community, what you can do there, and then just staying attuned. I think one challenge of these moments is it becomes so overwhelming, but I do think, at some point, we’re going to have an opening to really shift things. So I want us to be as ready as possible for that moment, and bring more people in.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Silky Shah. She’s executive director at Detention Watch Network. They’re online, DetentionWatchNetwork.org. Silky Shah, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SS: Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

Former high-ranking Biden administration officials should arguably be facing charges at the International Criminal Court for complicity in the Gaza genocide. Instead, they’re embraced by polite society and enjoy influential posts in corporate media, academia and Washington think tanks.

Their concealment of Biden’s declining mental faculties helped precipitate 2024’s disastrous electoral results.

Democratic leaders in Congress, ostensibly in an oppositional role, continue to respond to Trump’s militaristic authoritarianism, both at home and abroad, with characteristic fecklessness and even tacit support.

And ten years into America’s MAGA nightmare, Democratic leadership is no closer to offering voters a vision of the future that will pull the rug out from under Trump’s faux populism.

All of these issues are cause for introspection and accountability—two instincts we know establishment Democrats lack. It is no wonder, then, that their allies in corporate media—who share the same character flaws—are helping them slander one of the left’s most prominent critics of their joint inadequacies: Hasan Piker.

Advocating for Palestinian dignity

CNN‘s Dana Bash (4/8/26): “A Democratic candidate is forging a controversial alliance with a left-wing streamer who has defended Hamas terrorists.”

The wildly popular leftist streamer (he has over 3 million followers on the Bezos-owned Twitch streaming platform) is a unicorn in the overwhelmingly right-leaning digital media environment. His appeal to young men is exactly what Democrats lamented they were lacking following their walloping in 2024.

But his massive popularity poses a serious challenge to Israel’s supporters in the US. Piker is an outspoken anti-Zionist and advocate for Palestinian dignity and freedom. His increasing prominence has also made him a sought-after surrogate for progressive candidates. Last year, he campaigned for Zohran Mamdani in the hotly contested New York mayoral primary. This March, Piker campaigned with Michigan Senate primary candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

All of this led to a torrent of condemnations from centrist Democrats (and Republicans), who have launched bad-faith accusations of antisemitism. Corporate media outlets like CNN and the Atlantic have since jumped on the dogpile.

Jumping on the dogpile

CNN (4/8/26) quoted Hasan Piker’s stream (4/8/26) without noting that his comments were in the context of his urging his audience not to dismiss firsthand accounts by former Israeli captives of sexual violence. 

The first of these was about Hamas’ conduct in its October 7 attack on Israel. Bash displayed Piker’s words on the screen and read them aloud:

It doesn’t matter if f***ing rapes happened on October 7. Like, that doesn’t change the dynamic for me…. The Palestinian resistance is not perfect.

Bash claimed this was evidence of Piker “excusing sexual violence by Hamas terrorists.”

But she lifted the lines out of context in a way that completely distorted their meaning. In that stream, Piker argued against viewers who denied that Hamas committed any sexual violence or rapes on or after October 7. He countered that there is “real evidence…from hostages…that [sexual violence] did happen, and that is very important,” and further stated: “I’ve never discounted the likelihood that sexual violence did occur on October 7 and after.”

He continued, leading into the excerpt Bash quoted:

None of [this] justifies Israel’s actions. So it doesn’t even matter. None of this justifies that—Palestinians have a right to dignity, a right to emancipation, a right to live fucking free lives—free from this occupation. It doesn’t matter.

It’s a brash statement, but Piker is clearly not “excusing sexual violence”; he’s saying sexual violence doesn’t excuse genocide.

Bash was one of the key spreaders of the unsupported assertion that Hamas perpetrated widespread and systematic sexual violence that day—one of the chief claims that the US and Israel used to manufacture consent for the Gaza genocide—and one which she has never retracted.

By contrast, Bash and the US corporate media, with few exceptions, regularly fail to elevate the documented evidence of widespread, systematic sexual violence by Israel against Palestinians (FAIR.org, 10/7/24).

Bash, who is complicit in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, feels entitled to condemn Hasan Piker for insensitive comments aimed at debunking the harmful lies spread by Bash and her ilk. The fact that Bash is placed in the position of judging Piker illustrates the inverted moral standards of the genocide-supporting US corporate media.

‘Messing around for 60 years’

Hasan Piker on Pod Save America (4/12/26): “I’m anti-civilian murder. I’m anti-civilian death…. I don’t want random people to die. I don’t even want people to go out and die in the process of trying to kill people.”

Bash then criticized another of Piker’s comments:

He also claims Hamas is, quote, “a thousand times better than Israel.” Hamas is a designated terror organization, not just by the US, but by the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

Terrorist designations are political, not objective, as any good journalist surely knows; that Israel is not a designated terror organization, according to those countries, says more about its political alliances than about the legality or ethics of its actions. In just the first two months of the Gaza genocide, Israel killed more Palestinians than the sum total of Israeli deaths by any Palestinian acts of violence or armed conflict since its creation in 1948.

Another of Piker’s previous comments shared by Bash was his previously retracted claim that “America deserved 9/11,” which Piker himself recently addressed on Pod Save America (4/12/26):

That was me responding to Daniel Crenshaw, ironically enough, on the Joe Rogan Experience, where he was making this ridiculous argument that, like, we have to go out and fight these people all the time because they hate us, because they ain’t us. I was like, “That’s insane. That’s not the reason.”

[My claim] was actually echoed by Robert Kagan, one of the godfathers of neoconservatism, just last week, where he came out and was like, “Yes, actually, we have been messing around in the Middle East for, you know, upwards of 60 years, and that’s precisely the reason why 9/11 happened.”

These statements, however tactless or provocative they might be, demonstrate Piker’s engagement in the work of challenging dominant narratives—championed by corporate media—that advance imperialist aims.

‘Fringe folks trying to weasel in’

Semafor‘s Shelby Talcott assured CNN viewers (4/8/26) that “one of the reasons that Democrats lost in the last election was because the American people felt like they were too far to the left”—ignoring findings that a main factor in the Democrats’ loss was that they “offered little to activists with concerns about Gaza, racial and economic justice, and immigration.”

Bash also highlighted Piker calling Zionism “a racist ideology.” “Now, just a little bit of factchecking here,” Bash retorted that Zionism is

an ideology supporting the notion of a Jewish state, the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. He just called that a racist ideology, the right for Jews to have self-determination.

Bash’s “factcheck” overlooked the reality that the creation and maintenance of a “Jewish state” necessarily means the denial of “self-determination” for non-Jews, and is therefore a racist project.

It is a matter of historical record that the creation of the state of Israel—known to Palestinians as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe” in English—resulted in the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from land they had inhabited for millennia. That the belief in a “Jewish state” requires non-Jews to receive unequal citizenship rights was affirmed by the Knesset, Israel’s legislature, in 2018.

When Bash brought in a three-journalist panel to discuss Piker’s comments, Semafor White House correspondent Shelby Talcott said, “I think everyone can agree [they] are unacceptable.” She compared Piker to right-wing extremists: “You have the same issue in the Republican Party, where you have fringe folks sort of trying to weasel their way into this quote-unquote mainstream orbit.” No one on the panel dissented.

‘Losing the Democratic Party’

The Atlantic‘s Jonathan Chait (4/16/26) scorned Hasan Piker for “liken[ing] the leaders of Hezbollah, a terrorist arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to Nelson Mandela”—who headed the ANC’s military wing, which was on the United States’ “terrorism” watch list from 1988 until 2008.

The first of these articles was headlined, “Israel Moderates Are Losing the Democratic Party,” in which Jonathan Chait complained that the growing influence of progressive characters like Piker in the Democratic Party might drown out supposedly sensible centrist ideologies.

Chait began by parsing some of the same past comments of Piker’s that Dana Bash did. As Chait accused Piker of laundering Hamas’s actions, Chait himself laundered Israel’s October 7 atrocity propaganda:

Although he allowed, after October 7, 2023, that “the Palestinian resistance is not perfect”—who hasn’t raped, kidnapped and massacred 1,200 civilians from time to time?—he defends Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler-colonial apartheid state.”

Of course, the myth of systemic sexual violence on October 7 remains false, whether its spread by Chait or Bash. And while Hamas clearly kidnapped and massacred Israeli civilians, Chait felt the need to juice the numbers: even the Israeli government only claims that 800 of the 1,200 individuals who were killed that day were civilians, with the rest being mostly security forces. (Even 800 may be high, given that it’s acknowledged that some of the Israeli civilian victims on October 7 were killed by friendly fire.)

‘The views they want to mainstream’

For the Atlantic (10/22/24), Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney was not at attempt to convert Democrats to neo-conservatism, but to persuade Republicans ” to make a decision that might feel like a betrayal but is in fact an act of loyalty to country above all.”

Chait took El-Sayed’s choice to associate with the supposed terrorist-sympathizing Piker as evidence that El-Sayed must share all of these views himself:

If El-Sayed doesn’t think that people should discuss his rally with Piker, why would he hold a rally with Piker? The answer, of course, is that he believes Democrats should discuss Piker, but only to agree with him.

This sort of deflection is a common move for political activists when their ally has done something too embarrassing for them to openly defend, but that they do not wish to condemn. They are recognizing the unpopularity of the views they want to mainstream.

Putting aside the falsities, the idea that El-Sayed was attempting to mainstream views held by Piker, as opposed to seeing an opportunity to attract votes from Piker’s audience, is based on a standard that neither Chait nor centrist corporate media as a whole would typically apply to establishment Democrats’ embrace of right-wing figures. Kamala Harris, for example, was not assumed to hold all the same views as neocon Republican Liz Cheney when they joined forces during Harris’ 2024 presidential bid.

Chait also seemingly overestimated the “unpopularity” of Piker’s views, despite the fact that his argument rests on a warning that Piker’s influence over the Democratic Party is growing. Since the manufactured scandal over Piker’s appearance with El-Sayed, the candidate has nevertheless risen to first place in the polls.

‘Invisibility baked into the system’

On a New York Times podcast (4/22/26), Hasan Piker advanced a shocking moral claim: “If someone needs the food, they should absolutely steal it.”

The corporate media assault on Hasan Piker isn’t only about policing criticism of Israel. The Atlantic’s other hit pieces on Piker show it is about maintaining corporate influence in politics as well.

The Atlantic ran not one but two articles ginning up outrage over offhand comments made by Piker during a recent appearance on the New York Times “Opinions” podcast (4/22/26).

During the podcast, Piker and the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino adopted some irreverent positions while decrying the hypocritical moral standards in our hypercapitalist society.

The host, Nadja Spiegelman, prompted the discussion by introducing Piker and Tolentino to what she called “microlooting,” an internet trend she says involves stealing things from massive companies in protest of corporate wage theft. During the interview, both guests said they see no moral harm in stealing items from a grocery chain like Whole Foods, internet piracy or destruction of property as forms of protest, but were skeptical about the effectiveness of “microlooting” as a protest tactic. Americans “lack the capacity, unfortunately, to engage in some kind of organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective,” Piker said.

They also both eschewed what they see as hypocritical outrage in discussions about theft and violent crime. Piker noted that these discourses fixate on policing the underclass rather than on systemic exploitation and violence:

The rules are already designed in a way where if you steal from the poor, you become rich; if you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison. So there’s only one direction where you can do unlimited theft and erode the social contract for the 99%. There’s an invisibility baked into the system that allows the wealthy to engage in this behavior, because—it’s a cliche at this point—but wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America.

“A similar invisibility exists in structural violence, as opposed to individual acts of violence, as well,” Piker pointed out.

‘A very silly conversation’

The Atlantic‘s high dudgeon (4/23/26) illustrates Piker’s actual point: “Harm committed by the individual, strangely, continually draws more ire than the same harm being committed by a structure.”

Piker and Tolentino’s comments were helpful translations for how many Americans contend with ethical life given the vast disparities of wealth and power in this country. But the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood and Thomas Chatterton Williams don’t seem to care.

Instead, Wood—the man who prompted outrage two years ago when he defended Israel’s genocide in Gaza on the grounds that “it is possible to kill children legally” (Atlantic, 5/17/24)—framed their comments as distressing in his article (4/24/26), richly titled “Something Is Happening to America’s Moral Code.” “Piker’s romantic view of crime is, shall we say, not shared by the Chinese Communist Party,” Wood scolds.

Similarly, Williams (4/23/26) lambasted the two podcast guests for supposedly contributing to America’s moral decay:

And so a very silly conversation leads to a series of positions that are far from frivolous. Its overarching premise is that the law loses its legitimacy when political and economic elites violate—or are merely perceived to violate—the social contract. In such a world, ordinary people become entitled to ignore rules as they see fit. Neither Piker nor Tolentino explicitly endorses violence. But it is a short conceptual bridge from where they sit behind microphones to political murder.

Never mind that Wood and Williams are working from a total caricature of Piker and Tolentino’s actual beliefs; it is patently absurd for the Atlantic to dedicate this much ink reacting to offhand comments made on a podcast while at the same time regularly defending the greatest moral catastrophe in modern US history—support for an ongoing genocide.

Hasan Piker’s growing popularity has everything to do with the bankrupt moral character of establishment Democrats and their allies in the media. The elitist pearl-clutching on display in the ongoing false controversy over Piker only shows that his critique will continue to be sorely needed.

FAIR was founded with the help of a “grant” from the LAPD (Extra!, 1–2/06).

For 40 years now, FAIR has raised hell about corporate media bias, censorship, and persistent exclusion of peace and justice voices. I left FAIR’s paid staff in the year 2000, but 26 years later, I still often receive totally undeserved thanks and compliments for FAIR’s excellent output that I had absolutely nothing to do with.

I came up with the idea for FAIR in the mid-1980s, when corporate news outlets were on bended knee for a reactionary, declining, war-mongering president—and when Reaganism was ushering in an era of dangerous media mergers. Thankfully, FAIR is still around to challenge today’s even worse media conglomeration—including the sinister, step-by-step power grab by Trumpite billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle. And Paramount/Skydance. And TikTok. And perhaps Warner Bros. Discovery.

In the early years of FAIR, I would sometimes hear from journalists in corporate media who genuinely welcomed our presence—as a media watch group that cherished journalism, unlike media-bashing right-wing groups—but who thought we were putting far too much emphasis on media concentration as a villain. In the era of Ellison, FAIR is widely understood to have been correct, even prophetic.

In These Times‘ repost (3/8/16) of Adam Johnson’s FAIR piece (3/8/16).

FAIR’s staff today is not much bigger than in our early years, but its reach is immeasurably larger, thanks heavily to the Internet. It warms my heart when I’m reading one of my favorite news sites—whether Common Dreams or Truthout or Salon or whichever—and see they’ve reposted one of FAIR’s insightful articles. My heart was especially warmed ten years ago when I saw Bernie Sanders at a presidential campaign rally holding aloft a printout of a FAIR article that had gone viral: “Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours.”

Sanders was the first member of Congress to approach FAIR about working together to challenge corporate media bias. But he was not the first presidential candidate whose biased coverage prompted FAIR to speak out. That honor belongs to Jesse Jackson, whose 1988 campaign was subjected to persistently biased and patronizing coverage.

Advances in communication technology played a significant role in growing FAIR’s abilities. At our founding, our “dialogue” with offending news outlets took place in slow motion. Once we had a fax machine (and fax numbers sometimes provided by sympathetic insiders), FAIR could get under their skin instantaneously. We once faxed a complaint to the office of anchor Tom Brokaw about bias in that evening’s NBC Nightly News while he was still on the air; as soon as the program ended, Brokaw faxed us back an angry response. Victory! Our criticism was heard.

A FAIR study (3/18/03) found that in two weeks of TV news coverage before the Iraq invasion, only one out of 267 US sources represented an antiwar group.

In the pre-internet era, FAIR was one of the first progressive nonprofits to pay for the expensive Nexis database (and happily shared our resource with independent journalists). Nexis allowed FAIR to do serious studies of corporate media bias and censorship in a few days or weeks, rather than months. To give just one example, FAIR documented the TV networks’ near-total exclusion of antiwar voices in the run-up to the Iraq invasion (3 out of 393 on-camera sources), a study that Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman has cited year after year in her critique of establishment media.

Then came the internet, which put the organization in orbit through enhanced research and dissemination, such that candidates like Sanders could cite FAIR’s research on the campaign trail. FAIR has achieved global reach and a sterling global reputation, as I’ve learned over the years when traveling in Latin America and Europe.

Forty years on, what has been accomplished? We knew from day one that, given the corporate and commercial structures, a different media can only come as part of the broader battle for a more just society. But our main goals were always 1) to inform people why they should be skeptical of corporate media content; 2) to encourage activism against media bias and corporatization; and 3) to urge support for non-conglomerated, independent journalism.

FAIR was somewhat alone 40 years ago in disseminating an informed critique of corporate news and in spurring media activism. Today, I see a torrent of intelligent media criticism pouring out of independent outlets, social media, Substack, podcasts—and reaching millions of active citizens. It’s a roar. When I talk to these hugely successful progressive journalists and “influencers,” much younger than I, it’s rare that they don’t bring up how FAIR inspired them to do what they do.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

AP/PBS (6/6/26)

This week on CounterSpin: PBS News told its audience “What to Know About the Protests and Arrests Outside a New Jersey Detention Center.” What to know, evidently, is that protesters “say they are showing up in solidarity with detainees inside over accusations of poor living conditions.”

Maybe they aren’t showing up in solidarity; that’s just what they say. And poor “living” conditions?—because it’s their home now?—that’s also just an “accusation.” Why can’t we see what’s true? Oh, because reporters who try to see what’s happening are being kept from doing so with rubber bullets and tear gas. But for PBS News, that means: We just can’t know!

“Delaney Hall detainees say they are being given moldy and expired food,” the article (from AP) reads. But you know what? “President Donald Trump and his deputies have defended the center’s operations and denied there is any hunger strike, abuse or poor conditions inside.” We hear from Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin: “The fact is, we’re giving them the calories they want.” And we get a quote from Tom Homan, described as “Trump’s border czar,” saying he got to visit, and “the spaghetti was good.”

PBS News tells readers that Attorney General Todd Blanche “shared images of bloody wounds and bruises” sustained by ICE officers. There is not a single quote from a protester, an immigrant rights advocate, or even a journalist who says that people should be able to see what is being carried out in their name. But PBS News assures: That’s “What to Know”!

We’ll have a different conversation about what’s happening at Delaney Hall, and the bigger systems and structures in back of it, with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network.

Jersey Vindicator (6/5/26)

And: Yes, times like these make you wish for brave reporters who go to where the darkness is and shine a light. And we have them. They just aren’t at the traditional media you may have learned to look to. We’ll talk about the crucial role of frontline reporting with Vanessa Maria Graber, senior director of journalism and media education at the group Free Press.

After entering Lebanon with an invading army, the New York Times‘ Isabel Kershner (10/13/24) reported the shocking news that residents had stockpiled the kinds of weapons one might use to repel an invading army.

In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.

Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”

Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”

The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”

And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.

‘Urgent evacuation warnings’

The Public Source (8/27/25) asks: “Can embedding with an illegal invading force—one that routinely targets and kills journalists—ever be a ‘fair method‘ of newsgathering, or an ethical journalistic practice?”

While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip.

There has been no remotely comparable destruction on the Israeli side, and a recent Reuters article (5/31/26) that had attempted to suggest some symmetry now comes with the preface: “This May 31 story has been corrected to remove a reference to tens of thousands of Israelis being displaced by Hezbollah fire, in paragraph 3.”

Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire (FAIR.org, 10/21/25), the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people, all the while setting the stage for a massive land grab with its creeping so-called “evacuation orders.” These “evacuations” have been focused on the Shiite demographic, with Israel warning Christian and Druze communities not to allow Shiite neighbors to take refuge in their towns (New York Times, 4/1/26).

Lebanese journalist Habib Battah, co-author of the aforementioned Public Source investigation, suggested to me that such orders might be more accurately termed “ethnic cleansing directives.” But that, of course, would be way too much for corporate media outlets to handle—and so it is that we learn about Israel’s “urgent evacuation warnings” and “large-scale evacuation orders,” as though it’s some sort of public service announcement, fire drill or other fundamentally legitimate Israeli undertaking, rather than entirely illegal in addition to downright psychopathic. From a legal and moral perspective, after all, you can’t just go around ordering people in other countries out of their homes, oftentimes only to bomb them when they comply.

Then there’s the matter of the “Yellow Line” or “security zone”—more terminology borrowed from Gaza (FAIR.org, 5/19/26)—which denotes the portion of south Lebanon that Israel is currently illegally occupying. But Israel has never been very good at staying within the lines, and its latest “evacuation orders” spanned no less than one-fifth of the entire country, far beyond its own unilaterally appointed Yellow Line.

As Battah remarked to me, the media’s acceptance and deployment of such arbitrary vocabulary creates “artificial structures” and a sense of orderliness, when in reality “there’s no yellow lines, there’s no yellow, there’s no colors—these are just illegal invasions.” And because media are committed to sanitizing Israel’s behavior rather than questioning it, “colonization becomes normalized.”

‘A warning to residents’

Reuters‘ headline (6/4/26) puts the onus on Hezbollah for not agreeing to a ceasefire with Israel—despite the fact that Israel has carried out 3,500 airstrikes on Lebanon since the last ceasefire was announced.

The eagerness of journalists to do Israel’s bidding is all the more confounding given that Israel is currently the No. 1 killer of journalists in the world. A recent Associated Press article (5/29/26), for example, reduced the pulverization of Lebanon to simply “ongoing fighting in southern Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.”

A June 4 Reuters writeup blamed Hezbollah for having “rejected” the latest US-mediated “ceasefire” plan—which, mind you, would basically have given Israel the green light to seize south Lebanon outright. Reuters refrained from referencing the thousands of Lebanese casualties since March, but did allow Israel the usual space to defend its depredations: “The Israeli military, in a warning to residents of the south, said it was continuing to target Hezbollah facilities.”

This is not to say that corporate media do not report on the destruction, displacement and killing in Lebanon; they do—and sometimes even sympathetically. But the refusal to paint a consistent and properly contextualized picture of what is actually going on in the country means that they mostly just end up legitimizing Israel’s war crimes.

Imagine for a moment that Hezbollah had just killed thousands of Israelis in three months and occupied northern Israel. In doing so, it laid waste to 5,000-year-old cities, and bombed the fuck out of everything from homes to ambulances to World Heritage sites to university students to environmental activists who protect sea turtles. Suffice it to say we’d be hearing a lot more about the utter barbarity of it all—and that Hezbollah wouldn’t be allowed to claim ad nauseam that it was targeting “military facilities.”

Almost three years into a genocide that has officially killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians and given Israel every opportunity to blind the world with its true colors, it is no short of an abomination that Israeli officials are still permitted to insist—with little to no media pushback—that they only target “terrorists” and “terrorist infrastructure.” If Israeli officials were to claim that two plus two equals eight, or that Elvis Presley was living in a cave in Madagascar, would the corporate media also report such information with a straight face?

By taking Israel’s word for it, journalists wind up essentially validating mass killing and occupation—as in the corrected May 31 Reuters piece that straight up makes the case for Israel’s seizure of a 900-year-old castle that lies nowhere near the imaginary colored line:

The advance into Beaufort Castle has granted Israeli troops a vantage point ​over much of southern Lebanon and northern ​Israel, from which attacks have been launched ⁠towards Israeli residential areas.

‘Iranian proxy on its borders’

CNN (3/13/26) reported that “Israel believes it needs to establish a strong military defense to protect civilians from the Iranian proxy on its borders.” CNN‘s readers would have no way of knowing that Israel has killed 100 times more civilians than Hezbollah in their conflict since 2023.

Of course, willful media decontextualization and omission of relevant history facilitates the conversion of Israeli propaganda into “news.” One handy trick is to always, always, always remind audiences that Hezbollah is a “powerful Shia group supported by Iran,” as the BBC (5/28/26) puts it.

On March 13, CNN ran an analysis datelined Tel Aviv that bore the headline: “The War That Never Ended: Israel Seizes Moment to Finish Fight Against Hezbollah, Iran’s Proxy in Lebanon.” The analyst proceeded to justify Israel’s belief that “it needs to establish a strong military defense to protect civilians from the Iranian proxy on its borders.”

But while invoking Hezbollah’s support by Iran is practically a requirement for Western media reports, it is never deemed necessary to qualify Israel’s own orientation in any way—like, I dunno, “The war that never ended: Genocidal psychostate backed to the hilt by global superpower seizes moment to finish fight against Hezbollah.”

As for why this fight started in the first place, the media can somehow never summon the energy to explain that Hezbollah owes its very existence to Israel’s apocalyptic 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, prompting the group’s formation. Indeed, Israel’s lengthy history of invading Lebanon—not to mention its 22-year occupation of the south of the country, which ended in its ignominious eviction by the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance—would seem to be pretty crucial context in terms of understanding the current war. But those journalists who do bother to provide a bit of background do so in as ambiguous and cursory a fashion as possible, as in the New York Times’ explanation (6/3/26) that “Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades.”

A May 13 NBC News intervention headlined “Amid Ceasefire, Israeli Forces Ramp Up Destruction of Homes in Southern Lebanon” offers a roundabout summary of Hezbollah’s origins: “The group, formed in the early 1980s as a civil war consumed Lebanon, was created with support from Iran and sought to expel Israeli forces from Lebanese territory.” The piece went on to discuss some details of the present destruction in south Lebanon, including footage from a video posted to X on April 24 in which

two excavators can be seen destroying solar panels in the Christian border town of Debel, where a photo last month showed a soldier taking what appeared to be an axe to a statue of Jesus.

In a statement to NBC News that can be safely filed under the can’t-make-this-shit-up category, the Israeli army “said…that the damage to the solar panels was not in line with its values, and that disciplinary measures had been taken.” Here’s praying that corporate journalists might someday have the balls to take Israel to task on more existential matters.