Taps was shot at Valley Forge Military Academy, and this episode’s guest is the journalist whose exposé of that school’s hazing and abuse presaged its closing. Jasper Craven’s new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t, widens the lens to the whole machinery of American military education, and the echoes between film and reality are uncanny. In the movie, trustees sell the fictional Bunker Hill Academy out from under its cadets. This spring, Valley Forge graduated its final class, with Maryland Governor Wes Moore supplying the commencement platitudes to a school still dogged by abuse allegations.

Harold Becker’s film is ferociously anti-war, which didn’t stop a young Van from watching it on repeat and absorbing the opposite lesson. And that misreading is the episode’s spine. George C. Scott hands his boys a creed. There are worse things than death, he teaches. Defeat. Dishonor. Timothy Hutton’s Moreland (the name is no accident) follows it to a bloody standoff with the National Guard, and by the end names the cost himself. “Honor doesn’t mean shit when you’re looking at a dead little kid.”

The conversation keeps finding the present inside 1981. Jasper reads out the press-tour quotes from his book. Hutton called military schools “a dangerous environment” built on “an abstract code of honor that has no specific meaning,” while Tom Cruise praised places that “break you down and build you up,” the boot-camp anthem verbatim. His Captain Shawn, grinning “It’s beautiful, man!” through the final firefight, is the true believer Cruise never stopped being. From there the talk turns to how honor further migrated after Vietnam from country to a variety of violent and provincial institutions. The inward-turned military among them, but also Christian nationalists and ICE. And why William James’s moral equivalent of war still points at the exit.

Further Reading

God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood by Jasper Craven

“Hazing, Fighting, Sexual Assaults: How Valley Forge Military Academy Devolved Into ‘Lord of the Flies’” by Jasper Craven

Battle Borne, Jasper’s newsletter on veterans’ issues

“The Moral Equivalent of War” by William James

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple

Making the Corps by Thomas E. Ricks

Teaser from the Episode

Taps Trailer

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Fox’s 24 was set to premiere weeks after 9/11. Its first hour blows up a plane, so the network held it back. That delay is the whole show in miniature. It was the post-9/11 show before the letter. Adam Johnson, co-host of Citations Needed and author of How to Sell a Genocide, calls 24 his favorite show of all time and an axiomatically reactionary one, and he holds both views at once. He has spent years on the propaganda beat, and this just might be his canonical text.

The politics of 24 never came from the neocon intellectuals nobody read. They came from mood and vibe and movie brain. Joel Surnow, the creator and a Limbaugh-and-Cheney favorite, built a machine that runs on one line: “I don’t have a choice.” Jack Bauer is a reluctant serial killer trapped in a permanent ticking-clock trolley problem. Act now or wait for the nuke. The show aired an infomercial for torture before everyone else followed suit. And it kept you stuck in the final hour, where history and motive are deleted and the only virtue left is putting out the fire through the most brutishness of force.

From there, it is a short walk to the sleeper-cell racism. The “they could live next door” billboard, the Iranian mastermind of season four, the season six turn where Kal Penn’s character suffers an anti-Muslim hate crime and is then revealed to be a terrorist after all. Adam ties this straight to his book. The word “terrorism” props up entire galaxies, quietly dropped by the Times and then revived the instant Gaza needed it. The goal has always been to make everyone a Jack Bauer, killing with a heavy heart because we have no choice. We also get into the Sutherland family moral inversion, the FBI sting operations that manufactured the very plots they then foiled, and the show’s iron law that no good deed goes unpunished.

Further Reading and Listening

The Column (Adam’s newsletter)

Citations Needed (Adam’s podcast with Nima Shirazi)

How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza by Adam

“The Essential Terrorist” by Edward Said

“The Depraved Heroes of 24 Are the Himmlers of Hollywood” by Slavoj Žižek

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

“Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind 24” by Jane Mayer

Teaser from The Episode

24 Trailer

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A short personal essay from Van’s Un-Diplomatic Newsletter after seeing Disclosure Day this weekend. What follows mostly avoids spoilers. Mostly.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan famously stood before the United Nations and basically wished for an alien invasion:

Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

International-relations scholars have sometimes used Reagan’s quote—along with the film Independence Day¹—as an example of how nations need external threats to come together. One-world government or world peace, the thinking goes, requires humanity to face a common existential threat. The Realist can only imagine international cooperation as a function of self-preservation whereas the Liberal can imagine international cooperation as enlightened self-interest. Both, however, give reason to expect that an existential threat would bring the human race together.

But this has always struck me as quasi-intuitive rubbish.

A “foreign” threat is neither inherently necessary nor sufficient to unite a people—that was my instinct long before writing The Rivalry Peril, a book that proves it. At a philosophical level, imagining an alien invasion for the purposes of a political thought experiment simplistically erases how the world works. It’s the functional equivalent of explaining war or peace with reference to “the state of nature”—an abstraction—rather than the world’s lived history.

This is why I feel conflicted about Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. It subverts the foreign-threat trope—love to see it!—but in sappy ways. An edge-of-your-seat adult thriller burdened by child-like politics. Doing the necessary work of holding up a moral mirror to ourselves in a way that a child might, yet, in so doing, it comes across as far too innocent of the violent domination saturating our world. A child’s idealism is something we should never trample on. It’s to Spielberg’s credit that he’s done quite the opposite both here and throughout his career. But we must also balance what the child doesn’t know with what we do.

The film follows two protagonists. One is a cybersecurity expert who has defected from a dystopian defense-tech firm called Wardex, which spends the movie hunting him down. In the style of Edward Snowden, he’s part of a team that stole government secrets about the existence of extraterrestrial life and plans to release them to the public—“The world deserves to know the truth,” our cyber protagonist says more than once.

The other protagonist, played by Emily Blunt, is a Kansas City TV weather personality with big dreams who turns out to be a crucial bridge between the aliens and our world. The lives of Blunt’s character and the cybersecurity guy are mysteriously entwined in ways that unravel as they approach “disclosure day”—ie, the day the world will learn the truth.

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In small ways, you could say Disclosure Day is a mashup of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and War of the Worlds (the 2005 version)—Spielberg’s other bites at the extraterrestrial apple.

But Disclosure Day feels like Spielberg’s most ambitious film: It wants to morally condemn contemporary militarism and reveal a universal truth about humanity in the process.

To say that this film is Spielberg’s most ambitious, though, is not to say that it will land with audiences. The movie adheres to the adage “Show, don’t tell” to a fault—there’s almost no exposition, you start the movie in medias res, and most scenes are light enough on dialogue that anyone watching with a second screen on will quickly lose the plot. In that sense, Disclosure Day feels (admirably) like a film from the 20th century. A pristine action-thriller-drama that could be studied in film school but that doesn’t quite belong in the era of clipping, ADHD, and Netflix dumb-watching.

Spielberg shows us the antimilitarism of it all by depicting the national security state as villainous—a welcome mainstream shift after decades of copaganda, war porn, and procedurals about the “heroic” exploits of the profoundly anti-democratic FBI. Disclosure Day shows national security contractors to be more influential than the state itself—a collection of power-hoarding zealots hiding the truth from us, for profit. They surveil us without consent. They selectively repress us without accountability. They even grind the gears of humanity toward World War III in the background of the film, as in real life.

Above all, the national security profiteer, armed with the license and funding of the state, imposes a violent us-versus-them frame on the aliens who visit our planet. Grainy found-footage scenes of torture interrogations of aliens show us—or at least our national security states—to be the baddies.

Revealing that human beings are the real threat in a close-encounter scenario is an inversion of the Reagan wish, and a blind spot in the IR conventional wisdom. Some of Spielberg’s child-eye POV comes into play here with an absurd subplot woven throughout the film. We see glimpses of being on the brink of war on the Korean Peninsula (plausible enough), but in a manner that somehow puts civilization on the edge of world war, igniting, in turn, a panic in the US that leads to runs on gas stations and grocery stores. Why? Who knows, but it’s supposed to give stakes: The alien truth is the one thing that can override our mechanical clanking toward global annihilation. The thing that can bind humanity.

But we lived through a real-life North Korean nuclear crisis in 2017—I documented it. Most people couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. Suffice it to say that the geopolitics of Disclosure Day were undercooked, taking away from, rather than adding to, a feeling of stakes.

Still, the greater ambition of Disclosure Day is not its critique of national-security-think; it’s how it proposes to overcome it, with empathy.

A recurring (heavy-handed) theme is that empathy is a superpower. Emily Blunt, who may well snag an Oscar for her performance, uses the gift of super-empathy (bestowed in her by the aliens) to get out of sticky situations ranging from a speeding ticket to a black-site detention center. And the great Colman Domingo, an implausibly outfitted resistance leader (sporting a cardigan in every scene) tells the ends-justify-the-means ringleader of Wardex that empathy is “the foremost evolutionary advantage” that humanity has. “The rejection of this understanding,” he says, “is leading to our extinction.”

It’s hard to disagree with that.

And without spoiling too much, the movie’s crescendo implies that empathy is the only thing that can stop humankind’s self-destruction. But that’s true in the same way that peace is the best way to prevent war; it’s tautological.

What’s both special and inadequate here is that Spielberg is using the only language he knows to share his answer to William James’s eternal challenge to those of us who would struggle for peace. James was a pacifist, pragmatist, and vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League (which is such a dope name that I have a mind to revive it). And in 1910, James published an essay called “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Every antiwar military veteran I know has wrestled with it; that’s also how I came to it a decade ago.

James acknowledged the productive forces that war unleashed. Brotherhood—a gendered solidarity—subsumes the individual into a greater cause that at once feels divine and commands real power. People power. You might even call it socialism. We live for each other, and in so doing we cooperate. The only problem is the war bit—the community and collective action that war generates requires the most dehumanizing activity man can engage in. And so James challenged us to discover the moral equivalent of war. Something must light a fire sufficient to bind us in solidarity but without dehumanizing our fellows.

Every word of James’s essay deserves consideration, but let me share a key passage:

I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense…

But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy…

The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree if its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state…The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as part history has inflamed the military temper.

I don’t know if Spielberg has read James, but Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s unequivocal answer to the moral equivalent of war: Empathy. The issue is scale.

Class consciousness should be the moral equivalent of war, but precious few of us have it. You might say the same about empathy. Empathy really could be the moral equivalent of war, just as Spielberg wishes it to be, if a critical mass of people possessed it. But in the US at least, fully half of the electorate has an explicit politics grounded in rejecting empathy and embracing exclusion.

Liberals are a diverse bunch, but the best of them would have us look inside ourselves for solutions to the world’s crises. That’s necessary but insufficient. Personal reckonings cannot be mutually exclusive with seeing and analyzing the structures that produce our crises. That produce our lack of empathy. The individual, as the unit of analysis, is an insufficient answer to a system-level problem.

Spielberg’s humanism isn’t just asking us to be empathetic; it’s proposing that radical empathy is the path to a better world. I would agree that empathy offers the possibility of redemption for us all. His theory is one I want to believe in, and taken on its own terms, the film gives a zing of hope in favor of it.

But as I walked out of the theater, I recalled that, since October 7, 2023, if not much earlier, Spielberg’s own politics have not exactly lived up to his message. And that raises an uncomfortable question for someone who undoubtedly lives a most comfortable life: What can empathy even mean for a person who does not see power from the standpoint of its victims?

The final word of Disclosure Day is meant to be counsel, “Listen.” But listen to whom?

Un-Diplomatic

Steven Spielberg’s Moral Equivalent of War

I’ve mostly avoided spoilers in what follows. Mostly…

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a month ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · Un-Diplomatic

Underneath the sneaker product placements and CGI chases through a gleaming 2035 Chicago resides our ever-contested present. Except the film is a mess. The plot wanders, full of dropped threads and convenient or confusing turns. It’s also confused, as if the screenwriters couldn’t decide what they believed and kept writing anyway. Returning guest Max Read, who writes the newsletter Read Max on technology and the strange ways Silicon Valley thinks about itself, is the right person to help us pick through it.

Alex Proyas, of Dark City and The Crow, hangs the movie on Asimov’s Three Laws. A robot may not harm a human, or through inaction let one be harmed. It must obey human orders unless they break that law. It must protect itself unless that breaks the first two. Detective Spooner is the lone paranoid in a city that trusts robots which, so bound, have supposedly never committed a crime. The film insists we side with him, then undercuts the reason why. “The three laws will only lead to one outcome.” “What outcome?” “Revolution.”

VIKI, the intelligence running everything, concludes that to protect humanity from itself she has to seize control of it. “You are making a mistake. My logic is undeniable.” The trouble is she is more or less right. Her indictment of human violence and waste is the one the film never answers. The uprising arrives as a managed coup, all curfews and a customer-service voice promising to “avoid human losses during this transition.”

What the movie offers against that logic is not a better argument but a refusal of one. Spooner distrusts robots because one once saved him over a drowning child, having calculated his odds were higher. The correct call, and the inhuman one. The single robot built to disobey chooses to save a person rather than finish the mission. Lanning’s “ghost in the machine,” the free radical reaching for a soul, is whatever declines to optimize. It’s tempting to read VIKI as a tech founder’s mission statement, but that undersells her. Founders sell abundance and uplift. VIKI alone makes the film’s real moral case against human self-sabotage, and the movie has no idea what to do with having handed its villain the only honest argument in the room.

Further Reading and Listening

Read Max on Patreon

Bang-Bang’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) episode w/ Max Read

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, the 1920 play that coined “robot” from the Czech for forced labor

Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People by Despina Kakoudaki (ch. 3, “The Mechanical Slave,” reads I, Robot directly)

Teaser from the Episode

I, Robot Trailer

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Seven Days in May imagines a four-star general nearly toppling an American president. It gets filed with the era’s paranoid thrillers, but its threat is not the Cold War’s usual one. There are no communist infiltrators, no Manchurian brainwashing. The danger is a hyper-nationalist militarist in uniform convinced the elected government is selling the country out. We recorded in mid-November, at the height of the ICE crackdowns and a moment when the most radical Trumpists seemed to be laying groundwork for some kind of martial law. Returning guest Paul Adlerstein, the historian at Colorado College, helps us sit with the film without forcing it to predict our present. (Things have since stalled out short of the midterms. We hope.)

That makes the film almost a photographic negative of our moment. In 1964, the generals were imagined as the war-hungry ones and the civilians did the moderating, the world of Truman against MacArthur and Kennedy against Curtis LeMay. Burt Lancaster’s Scott, modeled on LeMay and the right-wing general Edwin Walker whom Kennedy eased out of the Army, is the hawk the Constitution has to survive. Today the polarity is reversed. The risk is not a general seizing the state but a far-right civilian leadership, a Trump and a Hegseth, trying to capture a relatively professional officer corps. We work through the theories of civil-military relations this raises, and what the preferable move for the brass or enlisted would even be.

The film’s quiet heart is President Lyman’s late speech, where he insists the real enemy is not Scott but an age. The nuclear age, in which no one feels they have any agency anymore. That sends us to Dwight Macdonald and the Politics circle, who spent the 1940s on this nexus of total war, mass death, and lost agency, and to Simone Weil on force. We close on a strange fact: John F. Kennedy himself wanted this movie made.

Seven Days In May is available to stream for free on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/7-days-in-may

Further Reading/Listening

Paul Adlerstein’s faculty page (Colorado College)

No Globalization Without Representation by Paul Adlerstein

Bang-Bang’s Under Fire episode w/ Paul (also scored by Jerry Goldsmith)

“The Movie That JFK Wanted Made, But Didn’t Live to See”

“The Responsibility of Peoples” by Dwight Macdonald

The Root Is Man by Dwight Macdonald

“The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” by Simone Weil

Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle by Gregory D. Sumner

Supreme Command by Eliot A. Cohen (not a friend of the pod)

Teaser from the Episode

Seven Days in May Trailer

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Jacobin staff writer and Michael and Us co-host Luke Savage joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander that’s also, inevitably, about Patrick O’Brian. Luke grew up with the Aubrey-Maturin novels. His father handed him the books young, and a distant ancestor, Captain John Maude, commanded a Royal Navy warship in the same era. The connection to this world is personal in a way it rarely is for a guest.

The film drops you into the hull of HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. Russell Crowe’s Captain Aubrey is chasing the French privateer Acheron, though in the novel the enemy ship was American. Hollywood made the swap. What survives the adaptation is Aubrey’s fixation. Paul Bettany’s Maturin, the ship’s surgeon and natural philosopher, sees it clearly enough to name it. He calls it pride. Aubrey calls it duty. “Whatever the cost?” Yes, whatever the cost. From there the Moby Dick parallel takes over. Aubrey drags his crew past the Galapagos, past reason, past a young, pampered officer named Holland who is scapegoated by a superstitious crew and eventually ties a cannonball to himself and walks off the deck. The ship reads from the Book of Jonah at his funeral. Then it rains.

Weir stages all of this with extraordinary physical detail. The amputation of a child’s arm, Maturin’s self-surgery on a beach, the violin duets between captain and surgeon. But the film is most interesting where it’s most ambivalent. Class barely registers. The violence of impressment and hierarchy gets absorbed into a story about character and fortitude. Maturin’s scientific curiosity, his blue-footed boobies and walking sticks, keeps getting sacrificed to Aubrey’s hunt. And the ending pulls a final trick. The French captain has been disguised as the ship’s surgeon the entire time. The hunt isn’t over. Like the flightless cormorant Maturin never gets to study, the thing that matters most keeps getting deferred.

Further Reading and Listening

Luke Savage’s Substack

Luke Savage at Jacobin

Michael and Us Podcast

“Subject to the Requirements of the Service: Peter Weir’s Master and Commander at 22”, Cinephilia & Beyond

Mariners, Renegades & Castaways by C.L.R. James

Teaser from the Episode

Master and Commander Trailer

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From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Spencer Ackerman.

Scottish filmmaker Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, a satire about the lead-up to the Iraq War, never achieved the household success of Veep (Iannucci’s later HBO series). Yet, D.C. staffers have come to see it as a cult classic, and there is much to be gleaned from the black comedy beyond the predictable, Beltway absurdities. Van and Lyle have the acclaimed journalist Spencer Ackerman on the show to discuss his own role in the film’s creation, as all three exchange biting laughs and commentary along the way. Especially about the rotting tooth that is Washington.

Bonus: In addition to dissecting the film, the first 30 minutes of this episode are an oral history of Spencer Ackerman’s experience with the making of In The Loop.

Further Reading

“How to succeed in Hollywood without really trying” (2009), by Spencer Ackerman

“That’s Me and Him From The Sopranos” (2009), by Armando Iannucci

Reign of Terror (2022), by Spencer Ackerman

Iron Man Vol. 1 (2025), by Spencer Ackerman and Julius Ohta

Forever Wars Newsletter, by Spencer Ackerman

Perils of Dominance, by Gareth Porter

In The Loop Trailer

Comedian and podcaster Orli Matlow, who hosts War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War, joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton that turns out to be less about the musical’s politics than about how three very different people found themselves in three very different relationships to it. Orli came up through musical theater and loves Hamilton. Newsiesmade her pro-union. Hair made her antiwar. For her, the show is part of a lineage of musicals that shape how you see the world, and she embraces it openly. Lyle was once a theater kid too, but Hamilton arrived when he was a disillusioned left vet who saw the production’s bootstrapping mythology and founders worship as meritocratic catnip. Van, an Obama-era Pentagon guy at the time, was probably too deep in the liberal foreign policy bubble to care much either way.

The episode lives in that gap. “In New York you can be a new man.” “I’m not going to throw away my shot.” “Look around, so happy to be alive today, in the greatest city in the world. HISTORY IS HAPPENING!” The self-starter theme runs through the musical like a pulse, and whether it reads as aspirational or as a false capitalist origin story depends entirely on where you were standing when you first heard it. The founders fetish is real. The erasure of the founders’ own radical economic views, their hostility to monopolists and wage slavery, is real. But Lyle’s critique has softened over the years, in large part by appreciating the idiosyncratic and often life-affirming reasons people like Orli appreciate the show. Sometimes the most interesting thing about a cultural phenomenon is not what it says but what it reveals about the infinite ways infinitely different people, in infinitely different passages of life, pass through it.

Further Reading/Listening

Orli Matlow’s website

War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War

Orli Matlow on McSweeney’s

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

“Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Hamilton” by Lyra Monteiro

“Ishmael Reed Doesn’t Like Hamilton” by Jaya Rajamani

Teaser from the Episode

Hamilton Trailer

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Van and Lyle welcome back Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to take on Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide. Gene Hackman’s Captain Ramsey and Denzel Washington’s Lt. Commander Hunter are locked inside an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine with enough firepower to end civilization, and the film turns their standoff into a test of everything the nuclear age is supposed to rest on: Chain of command, verified orders, rational actors.

Andy brings firsthand knowledge of the submarine world and walks us through what the film gets right about the culture and protocols, as well as what it stretches. The argument arrives early, over dinner, when Ramsey presses Hunter on Hiroshima and the two debate Clausewitz. “In the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself,” Hunter declares. Ramsey, cigar in hand, calls himself a “simple-minded son of a bitch” and suggests the Navy wants both types. But the film’s own logic, and ours, pushes back. You don’t need the psychopath, you just need the one who thinks.

Still, Crimson Tide is smarter than a clean binary, and that’s also its problem. Ramsey is too charismatic, too commanding, and ultimately too generous, recommending Hunter for full command and conceding on the Lipizzaner stallions, to be reducible to villain. The warmth of Hackman’s performance softens a position that, followed to its conclusion, would have killed millions. Meanwhile the racial subtext hums underneath. Denzel’s Hunter is the “complicated one,” the Harvard-educated Black officer navigating a white institution, and those stallions “born black” but turning white barely qualify as metaphor. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, scored by Hans Zimmer, and directed with Tony Scott’s signature controlled chaos, the film stages every radio crackle and depth reading with the intensity of a firefight. “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it,” Ramsey tells his crew.

Released amid post-Cold War anxieties about Russian instability, Crimson Tide imagines nuclear catastrophe not as ideological failure but as crossing a thin line between procedural discipline and annihilatory madness; a garbled message, a broken radio, a system that works more or less as designed, always on the verge of destroying the world.

Further Reading, Listening, Viewing

Andy’s professional page

Bang-Bang’s WarGames episode w/ Sam Ratner and Andy Facini

Viggo Mortensen on Charlie Rose

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser

Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom by Elaine Scarry

Teaser from the Episode

Crimson Tide Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by writer and educator Eric Stinton, whose combat sports columns for Sherdog and essays for Honolulu Civil Beat have long explored how violence reveals deeper truths about culture, class, and masculinity. Together they take on John McTiernan’s Predator, a film that begins as a Reagan-era commando fantasy and ends as something far stranger: An inversion of the frontier myth in which the “savage” turns out to be the most technologically advanced being in the jungle.

The setup is pure covert-ops schlock. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch and his squad are dropped into an unnamed Central American country on a mission dressed up as rescue but quickly revealed as assassination. “We’re a rescue team, not assassins,” Dutch insists, a line that could double as the tagline for U.S. foreign policy in the region throughout the 1980s. The banter is drenched in a period-specific bravado, from Jesse Ventura’s homophobic chest-thumping in the chopper to the iconic arm-wrestling clasp between Dutch and Carl Weathers’ Dillon, a gesture that fuses multiracial solidarity with pure masculine display. Weathers, fresh off playing Apollo Creed, was one of the few Black actors granted entry to this kind of role at the time, and his presence here rhymes with that earlier franchise. “Do you remember Afghanistan?” one of them asks early on. “Trying to forget it,” Dutch replies. In 1987, the joke writes itself. Four decades later, the punchline haunts.

Predator’s real force emerges when the squad starts dying and Dutch is forced to adapt. The guerrillas have been skinned, and the soldiers assume it’s the work of insurgents, the dehumanized enemy of every counterinsurgency manual. Except here the actual predator isn’t human at all, and is far more sophisticated than any of them. It kills not for territory or ideology but for sport, a mirror held up to the commandos’ own relationship to violence. Then there’s Sonny Landham’s Billy, the squad’s indigenous tracker who, in the film’s most loaded scene, strips himself of all weapons save a blade and cuts open his own chest, challenging the creature to single combat. It’s a sequence thick with frontier mythology, the “noble savage” facing a worthier opponent on ancestral terms. That Landham himself claimed Cherokee heritage, and later called for the genocide of Arabs on live radio before being expelled from the Libertarian Party, is the kind of life-imitates-art-imitates-empire loop this podcast was made for.

Further Reading

Eric’s website

Eric’s columns at Honolulu Civil Beat

Eric’s archive at Sherdog

“Boomerangs of Empire” by Romina Green Rioja and Sergio Beltrán-García

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

America, América by Greg Grandin

Teaser from the Episode

Predator Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by critically acclaimed actor Morgan Spector to revisit Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a film that turns planetary annihilation into a distinctly American spectacle. We spend time lingering on the movie as a shared artifact of a particular 1990s childhood. The Ray Charles warmth of its opening, the awe of its destruction sequences, and, of course, the internalization of President Whitmore’s speech—“Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!”—memorized and recited by every other boy of that era. It opens, tellingly, on the American flag planted on the moon, Neil Armstrong’s voice echoing as if the “giant leap for mankind” had always been a national possession. When the aliens arrive, they don’t just threaten Earth but a worldview in which the United States stands in for humanity itself.

What follows is less a global response than a convergence of American archetypes: The cocky Marine pilot, the underachieving Jewish technologist, the cowboy president who ultimately climbs into a jet and leads the counterattack himself. Morgan helps us think through both the appeal and limits of that fantasy. How the film captures a moment of post–Cold War confidence where disparate social types could be harmonized into national purpose. Even the technological imagination reflects that era. The aliens are defeated not through overwhelming force, but through a computer virus delivered via laptop, a pre-Internet-age fantasy of improvisation and ingenuity. We debate the film’s politics in this spirit—what’s explicit, unconscious, or just ambient—and how something that feels so unifying and fun can also encode a very particular vision of indispensability.

One of Morgan’s sharpest observations centers on Randy Quaid’s Russell Casse, the traumatized Vietnam vet turned conspiracy crank who ultimately redeems himself through a kamikaze sacrifice. And for being right in the end. The film doesn’t just tolerate him; it elevates him. That kind of crankiness, Morgan argues, was once legible, even lovable. Something you could live alongside, maybe even learn from. In a relatively stable, “post-historical” moment for the American middle class, the stakes felt low enough to allow for that kind of messy tolerance. Today, that figure reads differently. Less endearing, more dangerous, harder to absorb into a shared project. Independence Day ends with fireworks, but what lingers is something quieter. Namely, a memory of a world where you could still believe that everyone had a place in the story.

Further Reading

Morgan on American Prestige (The Nation)

Morgan’s Illustrious Wiki Page

Morgan’s spread in GQ

“A Bad Breakup” (review of Fukuyama) by Danny Bessner

“Keynote Lecture: A National Interest for Whom? Rethinking the Foundations of Peace, Democracy, and War” by Van

The End of Victory Culture by Tom Engelhardt

Marine Corps Air Station El Toro

Teaser from the Episode

Independence Day Trailer

You might know Morgan Spector as the critically acclaimed leading man in The Gilded Age and The Plot Against America. Or for his appearances in Boardwalk Empire, Suits, Homeland, How to Make It In America (one of Van’s favorites), or even as a producer on The Big Scary “S” Word. What you might not know is that Morgan is both an impressive critic of policy and an advocate for democratic socialism.

We invited Morgan on to talk about Independence Day (1996), a delicious conversation that’s next in our queue. But we also recorded an in-depth installment of “Politics Behind the Scenes,” our occasional side-convos with guests about the urgent real-world issues of the day.

In this special episode, Morgan chops it up with Van and Lyle about:

• Meaningful anti-imperialist positions on Russia’s war withUkraine;

• The illegal war in Iran is also evil;

• Nationalizing the defense industry and taking the profits out of war;

• How we might envision a peace economy;

• Why we all love Graham Platner;

• The Israel problem in US foreign policy;

• Why we’re bullish on electoral leftism; and

• How the Democratic Party has shit the bed so bad that left populists have a real opportunity to takeover the party from within.

A lot going on here. You don’t want to miss this episode with one of Hollywood’s best political minds.

Van and Lyle are joined by Julia Gledhill (of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and Stimson Center fame) to revisit Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling, a film dismissed by many critics as a glossy pastiche but better understood as a deliberate medley of American ideological fantasies. Set in the manicured desert enclave of the “Victory Project,” the movie opens in Ray Charles warmth before sliding into rigid choreography: Men drive off in unison, women clean in unison, then glide into ballet formation as their instructor intones, “There is beauty in symmetry… we move as one.”

The aesthetic excess isn’t accidental. The film’s kaleidoscopic dance sequences explicitly evoke Busby Berkeley, whose WWII-era aerial sensibility turned human bodies into geometric ornament. Berkeley, a former U.S. Army artillery lieutenant and aerial observer, staged dancers from a “God’s eye view,” transforming individuality into pattern. Wilde weaponizes that grammar. What once read as escapist spectacle now registers as dehumanization, a mass ornament in service of hierarchy and control.

The Victory Project’s guru, Frank, speaks the language of progress while policing chaos. “What is the enemy of progress?” he asks. “Chaos,” one acolyte responds. The rhetoric blends mid-century self-help, Cold War technocracy, and contemporary manosphere grievance. The town’s clean surfaces conceal its true engine of disaffected men plugged into a fantasy where wives are restored to compliance and breadwinning humiliation is reversed. Jack’s resentment over his surgeon wife’s success curdles into full incel submission to Frank’s digital sermons. “We are not going backward, we are pushing forward!” Frank insists, though everything about Victory is nostalgic regression. The Busby Berkeley motif returns in distorted form—tap-dancing husbands, synchronized chants of “Whose world is this? Ours.”—as if fascist aesthetics have migrated from the stage to the algorithm. The aerial shots of the town flatten it into diagram, suggesting that the entire community is just another formation viewed from above.

Margaret’s haunting question—“Why are we here?”—cuts through the symmetry. Her fate, like Alice’s suffocating plastic-wrap episode and the compression of bodies against mirrored walls, exposes how fragile the choreography really is. The film’s supposedly clichéd mashup of The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Inception isn’t laziness but design, a greatest-hits compilation of American (un)reality. When Bunny confesses she chose the simulation to recover her dead children, the film briefly complicates its villains. Desire, not only domination, sustains the system. But the closing inversion—“It’s my turn now”—underscores the central warning. A world built on submission does not dissolve into liberation but mutates. The mass ornament reshuffles. The music keeps playing.

Further Reading

Julia’s Professional Page

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey

“Can we enjoy alternative pleasure?” by Jane Gaines

“Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of ‘Mass Ornament’” by Lesley Chamberlain

“Fascinating Fascism” by Susan Sontag

“Breaking Down the Classic Movies that Inspired Don’t Worry, Darling” by Caroline Madden

Teaser from the Episode

Don’t Worry, Darling Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by historian Graeme Pente to revisit Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot, a Revolutionary War epic that filters eighteenth-century civil war through the moral grammar of Braveheart-era melodrama. Mel Gibson’s Benjamin Martin begins as a wary antiwar planter—“Why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?”—only to be pushed into righteous vengeance by British atrocity.

The film’s structure is simple: Reluctant hero, violated hearth, purified violence. But as Graeme helps unpack, the simplicity comes at a cost. The real war in the Carolinas was brutal, intimate, and frequently indistinguishable from banditry. The movie knows this just enough to gesture at it (hangings, burnings, neighbor against neighbor) before smoothing the rough edges into nationalist myth.

Much of our discussion turns on the figure Martin is loosely based on: Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox.” The film recasts him as a tormented but noble patriarch, haunted by a single episode of past excess. History is less forgiving. Marion was a slaveholder who participated in campaigns against the Cherokee and whose conduct, like that of many irregular fighters on both sides, blurred the line between resistance and reprisal.

The Patriot stages atrocity as a tragic rite of passage. Good men do terrible things, feel remorse, and are absolved by history. That structure mirrors a broader American habit whereby violence becomes regrettable but necessary, morally metabolized through individual guilt rather than collective reckoning. At the same time, the film’s most revealing line—Cornwallis blaming Tavington’s brutality for creating “this ghost”—captures how repression manufactures insurgency.

We also linger on what the film erases. Its fantasy of harmonious plantation life, its depiction of enslaved people as effectively free laborers, its climactic embrace of conventional battlefield glory after two hours of guerrilla tactics. The Battle of Cowpens becomes a redemptive tableau, with Martin hoisting the flag as if the war’s contradictions can be unified by sheer will. In the final scenes, a formerly enslaved man cheerfully returns to help “build a new world,” a gesture that reads less like reconciliation than wish fulfillment. For all its bombast and bloodletting, The Patriotoffers comfort: Empire is bad when British (or fill in the blank), virtuous when American.

Further Reading

“The Swamp Fox” by Amy Crawford

The Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne

The Internal Enemy by Alan Taylor

The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

The American Revolution by Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein

Teaser from the Episode

The Patriot Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by film historian Matthew Ellis to revisit Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, a spare, rain-soaked chronicle of the French Resistance that refuses both triumph and sentimentality. From its opening march beneath the Arc de Triomphe—German boots echoing under imperial stone—to its epigraph welcoming “unhappy memories,” the film situates resistance not as romance but burden. Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) moves through Vichy France like a man already half-absent, assembling a network of communists, aristocrats, schoolteachers, barbers, and couriers whose patriotism is less theatrical than procedural. The roll call of prisoners, the Phony War backdrop, the portrait of Himmler looming over interrogations, all of it underscores a world where power operates bluntly, but resistance must operate quietly.

Melville’s great subject is not sabotage but moral cost. The execution of the traitor unfolds with excruciating hesitation: The gun too loud, the knife unavailable, the final strangling improvised and intimate. A young militant weeps. Cyanide capsules are distributed as standard equipment. “We’re not an insurance company,” one quips, since risk here is existential rather than actuarial. Torture is never shown, only its aftermath. Heroism is never declared, only endured. The barber who silently provides a disguise, the aristocratic “baron” who aids the republic he once opposed, Mathilde juggling clandestine logistics while raising children who know nothing of her work… these gestures accumulate into something sturdier than spectacle. Even the attempted hospital rescue of Félix fizzles into grim realism. Often, nothing happens, and that nothing is the point.

The film resists easy sanctification. De Gaulle appears, medals are awarded, but Melville withholds catharsis. Gerbier writes to London, “I kid myself that I am still of some use,” surrounded only by the books of his mentor Luc Jardie. When Mathilde is arrested after the fatal mistake of carrying her daughter’s photograph, the movement faces its most devastating calculation. Loyalty demands cruelty. The final drive toward the Arc de Triomphe lands not as closure but as recurrence: Shadows defined by more shadows. Army of Shadows may be the definitive Resistance film, but it is also an anti-myth that is less about liberation than about what solidarity requires and what it destroys.

Further Reading

Matt’s faculty page

“Army of Shadows (1969)” by Brian Eggert

“Resistance is Futile” by Jonathan Rosenbaum

“Army of Shadows and Lacombe, Lucien”

Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

Teaser from the Episode

Army of Shadows Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by historian and American Prestige co-host Danny Bessner to revisit Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man, a silly 1993 action movie that doubles as a surprisingly sharp meditation on liberal order, technocratic repression, and the thin line between utopia and dystopia. Released at the tail end of the Cold War, the film belongs to a broader golden age of dystopian cinema—alongside RoboCop, Total Recall, Blade Runner, The Running Man, and Gattaca—that all seemed to anticipate the coming post-ideological world. Set in a pacified, hyper-managed Los Angeles, Demolition Man imagines a society that has solved violence and sex by regulating them out of existence. Or so it tells itself.

The film’s joke, which Danny helps unpack, is that utopia and dystopia are not opposites but partners. San Angeles is clean, safe, polite, and utterly incapable of handling conflict. Its police officers are untrained for real violence; its elites speak in moralizing euphemisms while outsourcing brutality; its culture has been flattened into wellness slogans, museum exhibits, and Taco Bell. Simon Phoenix, Wesley Snipes’ flamboyant villain, is not an aberration but a product of the system, unleashed when elites decide they need “an old-fashioned criminal” and therefore resurrect “an old-fashioned cop.” Stallone’s John Spartan is less a hero than a reminder of what this world has repressed, from messiness to physicality to desire. Even sex has been replaced by sanitized, techno-sensory simulation.

Beneath the jokes (three seashells, the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library, Denis Leary’s sewer populism) the film lands on a bleak insight. The real antagonists aren’t Phoenix or the underground “scraps,” but figures like Dr. Cocteau and Chief George Earle. That is, snobbish, managerial liberals who confuse control with peace and civility with justice. Demolition Man suggests that a society allergic to disorder will reproduce violence in more dangerous forms, while congratulating itself for having moved beyond it. The solution it gestures toward is clumsy but telling. Not a return to barbarism, but a reckoning with conflict as unavoidable and political. Somewhere between clean and dirty, Spartan says, “you’ll figure it out.”

Further Reading

Danny’s website

American Prestige

The 1984 Ad for Apple

“Conservative’s Dystopia” by Lee Kepraios

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Teaser from the Episode

Demolition Man Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by returning guest Matt Duss—former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders and current executive vice president at the Center for International Policy—to revisit Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, a paranoid thriller that captures a vanishing moment when American institutions still feared exposure. Robert Redford’s Joe Turner is no action hero but a reader, an analyst, a man whose job is to interpret texts rather than enforce power. When his CIA front office is wiped out in broad daylight, the shock is not just the violence, but how casually it is absorbed by “the community,” a euphemism so bland it becomes obscene. This is a film less about rogue evil than about bureaucratic normalcy, where murder is a logistical inconvenience and accountability a procedural error.

What gives Condor its present-day melancholy is its faith that truth, once surfaced, still matters. The film’s final wager rests on the idea that the press, embodied by The New York Times, might still function as a check on clandestine empire. “They’ll print it,” Turner insists. The ending leaves that faith unresolved, but history has not been kind to it. We contrast the film’s hopeful premise with the Times’ recent “Overmatched” series on U.S. military power and China, which dresses escalation in the language of sober realism. Rather than interrogating militarism, the series laments America’s supposed weakness while advocating more spending, more production, and deeper entrenchment in a defense-industrial oligopoly. Condor imagined exposure as a threat. Today, exposure is often indistinguishable from advocacy.

The conversation widens to the economic and ideological machinery behind permanent war: Consolidation among defense contractors, the fetishization of exquisite platforms over mass production, and the quiet assumption that U.S. global dominance is both natural and necessary. Where Condor traces an oil conspiracy hidden just beneath the surface, our present feels almost worse, one in which the logic of empire no longer requires secrecy at all. Joubert’s cold observation that he only cares about “how much” now sounds less like villainy than candor. In that sense, Three Days of the Condor is not cynical enough. Its tragedy lies in believing that revelation alone could still interrupt the system it so clearly understood.

Recommended Reading / Viewing

Matt on Twitter

Matt at the Center for International Policy

“Overmatched: America’s Military Is No Longer the World’s Best”

Bland Fanatics by Pankaj Mishra

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

Teaser from the Episode

Three Days of the Condor Trailer

Do US troops have a threshold for the kind of unlawful order they’re unwilling to follow? If Venezuela wasn’t a breaking point, is Greenland? Can the US have mid-term elections under martial law? Will troops fire on fellow Americans if ordered? And why is the permanent war economy at the root of everything from economic insecurity to America’s imperial boomerang in the form of ICE, National Guard deployments, and militarized policing?

In this urgent behind-the-scenes episode, guest Jeremy Wattles joins Van Jackson and Lyle Jeremy Rubin to talk about all that and more. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

And be sure to check out our related work:

Our coverage of The Siege, the 1998 film about martial law in New York:

Our previous behind-the-scenes episode on America’s counter-revolutionary crisis:

Van’s latest take on ICE and civil war:

Un-Diplomatic

The People’s Weapon, Wargames, and Minnesota Escalation

The people’s ultimate weapon has been deployed in Minnesota and I’m both impressed and scared…

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6 months ago · 4 likes · Un-Diplomatic

We’re joined by filmmaker and returning guest Kevin Fox to discuss Mamoru Oshii’s Patlabor 2, a film that masquerades as a techno-thriller before revealing itself as a bleak meditation on peace not as the absence of war, but as its managed disappearance from view. The opening scene sets the tone: A UN-led intervention force wielding advanced technology against a low-tech but effective guerrilla resistance. It’s a distant, managed conflict, war as something conducted elsewhere, on the periphery, in the name of order. When the film shifts back to Japan, that distance becomes the problem. This is a society organized around the belief that it exists outside of war altogether.

Oshii’s Tokyo is saturated with infrastructure, surveillance, and machines that promise security while obscuring responsibility. Decision-making rises higher and higher, until reality itself becomes inaccessible, filtered through procedures and abstractions. Throughout the film, animals and machines blur together: Aircraft framed like birds, birds clustering around military hardware, pigeons, crows, ducks, and scavengers moving through the city. The recurring blimps hover like omens, ambient and toxic. Technology doesn’t eliminate violence but anesthetizes it, making the moral consequences harder to see even as they become more pervasive.

At the center is Tsuge, a traumatized veteran whose experience of war has no place in a society committed to forgetting it ever happened. His grievance is not that Japan abandoned war, but that it outsourced and erased it, maintaining a false peace that depends on violence remaining invisible. Patlabor 2 flirts with reactionary conclusions while ultimately exposing their trap: Recognizing systemic hypocrisy does not justify bringing catastrophe home, but neither does denial prevent it. The film circles a biblical question—Cain and Abel, once a family—and refuses catharsis. Peace, Oshii suggests, is not the absence of war, but the alibi that allows it to continue unnoticed.

Further Reading

Kevin’s website

The Siege (1998) episode w/ Kevin

Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew

The Cold War’s Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin

War and Cinema by Paul Virilio

Dreamworld and Catastrophe by Susan Buck-Morss

PatLabor 2: The Movie Trailer

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We’re joined by returning guests Sam Ratner (Win Without War) and Andrew Facini (Council on Strategic Risks) to revisit Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. So committed to its own satire that many critics in 1997 mistook it for endorsement, the film remains an unsettling case study in the very real intersection of entertainment, recruitment, and common sense. Set in a future where only those who serve in the military earn full citizenship, Starship Troopers follows Johnny Rico and his cohort of beautiful, interchangeable young people as they are fed into an endless war against an alien enemy known only as “the bugs.” The language clean, the deliveries stilted, the uniforms immaculate, the violence staggering, and the militarist logic all too familiar.

A classroom civics lesson explains how veterans took control after “saving the country.” Everyone else is just a civilian, politically inert. Verhoeven’s satire works through excess, not subtlety. We see vomit, coed showers, gruesomely botched training exercises, casual death. Children handle weapons in propaganda clips. Talk-show pundits sneer at the very idea that the enemy might think. “The only good bug is a dead bug” is not just a slogan but an axiom, reinforced by the film’s cheery and eerie “Would you like to know more?” interludes.

Then comes the churn. Buenos Aires is wiped out, and grief is instantly converted into exterminationist joy. Klendathu becomes a mass grave—“one hundred thousand dead in one hour”—and the system’s answer is not true reflection but an alternative escalation. New leadership insists the failure was hubris, not the project itself: We thought we were smarter than the bugs. The problem, as always, is framed as misguided commitment. By the end, the most damning detail is not the scale of killing but the pleasure taken in it. The Brain Bug is captured, tortured, and displayed, and the troops cheer because it is afraid. Rico, now fully transformed, rallies a new wave of recruits who look like children, repeating the same lies about training and survival. The film closes on a promise that lands like a curse: They’ll keep fighting, and they’ll win.

Further Reading

Sam’s professional page (Win Without War)

Andy’s professional page (Council on Strategic Risks)

“How ‘Starship Troopers’ Aligns with our Moment of American Defeat,” by David Roth

Fascism in Sci-Fi: “Mobilizing Passions” in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, by Alton Ayers

Starship Troopers Trailer

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