The Intercept Live in Conversation With Robert Reich

Democrats may be ahead in the polls. But can they withstand billions in campaign spending by Elon Musk and other MAGA oligarchs? Will the election be safe from intimidation and interference? And even if they do prevail, what would a Democratic Congress actually do to obstruct Trump’s attacks on democracy?

For decades, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been sounding the alarm about rising inequality and the concentration of power in America. Having served in three presidential administrations, he’s become one of the loudest and clearest voices challenging Democrats for their failures in the Trump era.

Reich joins Intercept Briefing host Akela Lacy for a live conversation about the most pressing issues this midterm season. He is the author of numerous books, including his memoir “Coming Up Short,” out in paperback now. His media company, Inequality Media, has also made a timely new documentary, called “The Work in Progress,” exploring how everyday Americans across the country are navigating our democracy in these times.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept, and today we’re bringing you a special live episode to discuss who is trying to buy this election and who is succeeding. My guest, Robert Reich, has been a critical voice on how the forces of capitalism and inequality have shaped our electoral system and eroded our democracy.

Reich was a Secretary of Labor under former President Bill Clinton, and a longtime professor at UC Berkeley. He’s the author of numerous books, including “Coming Up Short,” out in paperback now, and which we spoke to him about on this podcast in November. And his media company, Inequality Media, has a new documentary exploring how everyday Americans across the country are navigating our democracy in these times. It’s called “The Work in Progress.” Bob, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Robert Reich: Thank you, Akela. It’s nice to see you again. 

AL: Likewise. 

RR: And Ben, thank you for that introduction. In fact, thank you. I wanted to thank The Intercept. You’re doing great work, and many of us very much appreciate it.

AL: Thank you. We appreciate that from you. Rob, you’ve been making one core argument for a very long time, that economic— 

RR: About 100 years, actually, Akela. [Laughter.]

AL: That economic inequality is the defining issue in America. It seems like we know this very well, and yet there’s very little being done about it. The cost of living has spiraled. 

Oh, my dog is very excited that Bob is joining us, so sorry about that. 

RR: No, I’m excited your dog is excited, 

AL: We know this very well, but there’s very little being done about it. As I said, the cost of living has spiraled out of control while corporate oligarchs continue to rake in profits. How do you see economic inequality playing out in this election cycle? 

RR: We are getting very close to the final kind of conflict between an oligarchic system and a democratic — small d — system. This has been growing and escalating for the past 40 years. I remember talking about this in the early ’90s, saying and predicting, sadly, that a two-tiered society would eventually lead to a demagogue who would try to wreck our democracy.

And here we are, 10 days away from a critical election, and I know we say it’s a critical election every time Akela, but this one really is. 

AL: We do. 

RR: This is because we can’t do very much if we have Donald Trump president and Republican sycophants and lap dogs in charge of Congress. He basically gets a free pass to do whatever he wants to do, and that’s got to end. 

AL: Upcoming Democratic candidates who have been messaging on economic inequality and affordability ran and won in the primaries. But many of them, like Abdul El-Sayed or Darializa Avila Chevalier, for example, are making this inequality argument by tying it to these underlying criticisms of the way the Democratic Party has always done politics.

They’re using the affordability crisis to hit the Democratic establishment for supporting the expansion of the federal police force we’ve seen unleashed on the nation, for bolstering Immigration and Customs Enforcement, funding foreign wars, and, as you know well, letting corporations off the hook for being part of the bipartisan machine that made what we’re seeing today possible.

Those insurgent candidates have won in many ways because of how they’ve positioned themselves in opposition to the Democratic Party. They’re hoping to then enter Congress and work inside. So I wonder, how, if at all, does that fundamental tension resolve itself? Or is there a limit to how much these candidates can really change things from the inside?

RR: It’s important for us to keep our expectations within reasonable kind of shape because even if the progressive part of the Democratic Party— Remember Bernie Sanders used to say “I represent the Democratic side of the Democratic Party.” That Democratic side of the Democratic Party or the New Deal side of the Democratic Party or the progressive side of the Democratic Party or the social democratic side of the Democratic Party, however you want to style it, is more powerful today than it has been at any time in my lifetime.

But it is not powerful enough yet to take over the Democratic Party. Now, we’re heading in that direction, and I think that we’ve got to — all of us on the outside — push the Democrats. When they get into power, hopefully they will take the House and maybe even, fingers crossed, take the Senate. When they get into power, all of us have to push them to be courageous and strong and take on the corporate Democrats, who are still very significant and quite powerful in the party. Otherwise, nothing is going to change. 

AL: It’s not surprising that there has been very little political change on economic inequality considering how much wealthy elites have poured into elections to maintain the status quo. We’ve seen record levels of ad spending, more than $10 billion so far this cycle, driven in large part by super PACs and billionaires. Who, in your view, is the biggest villain of this election cycle? 

RR: Let me think. Let me count the ways I can say Elon Musk. Look. Look, Elon Musk is exhibit A, B, C, and D in terms of why billionaires really do need to be taxed in terms of a wealth tax, why we’ve got to get big money out of elections, and we do, and there are ways to do it despite the Supreme Court’s decisions.

Third, why it is so vitally important to use antitrust to bust up big combinations of power. SpaceX has a monopoly on satellite communications, and we have witnessed over the past week exactly what that means in terms of foreign policy. Why should one person, the richest person in the world, make American foreign policy with regard to Ukraine and decide that Putin is going to essentially win the next round — hopefully not the final round — of his war with Ukraine?

It is absurd that Elon Musk is essentially the secretary of defense. There are many things that can be done, should be done, and I hope Democrats, if they are in the position to do them, will do them. 

AL: You’re giving me a great segue into our next question, which is about exactly this. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, also by far the single biggest known political donor this cycle.

He spent just under $300 million  so far to help President Donald Trump and the Republican Party keep at least one chamber of Congress. Musk is mostly spending to help Republicans maintain control of the Senate. While Democrats don’t have nearly the same Musk firepower on their side, earlier this week, billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — who governed as mayor as a Republican, I will note — made a last-minute $80 million infusion to help Democrats keep the House.

In our previous question, you were talking about what the progressive wing of Democratic Party needs to do to combat the corporate Democratic wing, and I think this is a good sort of test case for this. There’s something to be said for wanting to try to level the playing field in terms of how much spending is going into these elections, particularly from Musk and the Republican side.

But how can Democrats accept that kind of support and then say that their top priority is fixing the affordability crisis or addressing economic inequality? 

RR: It’s very difficult, Akela. One of the problems Democrats have had since the 1980s is if you drink at the same trough of campaign finance as Republicans, how do you ever bite the hands that feed you?

To change the metaphor slightly. That is, Democrats do have to figure out how to break away from the corporate sources of funding. Otherwise, there is no way that progressive Democrats, social Democrats, however we want to style ourselves, really can take over the party, and that is absolutely critical. It is necessary. 

We need a working person’s party. We need a party that really does center itself on poor people and working-class people and Black people and women and people who have been knocked out of politics by Trump. But also white male workers who are non-college educated, who have been so angry and frustrated at their loss of any economic position in this country over the last 40 years that they were vulnerable to this tyrant who comes along and says he’s going to represent them and be their tribune, named Donald Trump.

Let’s be clear, Trump and Musk are in league. They are basically the same people. They are both con men. They are both billionaires. They are both fronts for the billionaire class, and they are both doing a lot of work that looks like they are working with Putin and with Netanyahu and with other autocrats around the world.

AL: Talking about Democrats trying to break away from this corporate system, what would you want to see them do? I’ve heard, sources talk about, they don’t want to fight with one hand tied between, behind their back, right? And so they’re going to take money where they can, particularly when the other side has the resources that it does.

But what does that look like when we’re still within this system — post-Citizens United — before there is a broader institutional change? What does that look like while still winning the seats that you need to govern? 

RR: There are three important steps that progressive Democrats need to take to fight oligarchy when progressive Democrats have power. Even if they don’t have full power, they’ve got to do these three things. One is to develop a system of campaign finance that does not depend on big money. By that I mean probably public financing. Look at New York City, for example, or Seattle, or any places where you have progressives who have made great strides become mayors of these cities because they have public financing systems. That is, there is public dollars on a five-to-one or eight-to-one ratio for every small dollar donation. This is critically important to break the vice of big money in politics. 

Secondly, Democrats need to be in the vanguard of antitrust, busting up monopolies, because the monopolies that we see, so much of the country and so much of the economy is now monopolized. These monopolies feed the billionaires. That’s where the money for the billionaires comes from. 

Finally, we’ve got to have a wealth tax. We’ve got to tax big wealth. In California there is now on the ballot Proposition 40. We’re all working very hard for it, but the billionaires in California, guess what? They are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into trying to make it so that people don’t want to, trying to persuade people not to vote for this proposition. They are illustrating why it is so important to have a tax on billionaires, because otherwise billionaires are going to use their money like Elon Musk is doing like Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, is doing in California with regard to Proposition 40. They’re going to use their money to try to basically alter politics. 

AL: Speaking of just that, the issue of corruption has also been at the fore this cycle. New polling shows that more and more Americans, 66 percent, believe that Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself. That’s up 10 points from this time last year, I’ll note. But that perception never appears to actually hurt Trump. Why is that? If affordability and inequality are the defining issues of our time, why isn’t the fact that the public believes the president is openly corrupt doing more to hurt his brand? 

RR: First of all, his approval rating right now is lower than any president’s approval rating has been going into a midterm since I think since Harry Truman in 1946. This is historically extraordinary how many Americans, including Republicans, self-styled Republicans and most independents, have turned against Trump, and it is a combination of the affordability crisis. People see that his war in Iran and his tariffs have driven prices up, but they also see or are beginning to see the connection between those price increases and his corruption.

The war is in part supported and was maybe initiated by some of the billionaire class in terms of these high-tech billionaires who are making a lot of money off the war. A lot of AI money is in the war in terms of Palantir and other companies that are making huge amounts of money.

Elon Musk is making huge amounts of money off of his satellite communication system. In other words, there is a fairly obvious process by which wealthy people are buying pay-for-play benefits from this administration which hurt average people. Look at the tax increases that Trump has engineered on everybody else in order to get tax cuts for the super wealthy. By tax increases, eroding Medicaid and cutting food stamps. Those are tax increases. Even making Medicare less available, cutting the Affordable Care Act. All these things people are aware they are personally being hurt by this administration. 

When it gets to the level of personal, when it gets to this level where people say, “I can’t afford it. I’m living paycheck to paycheck. I’m barely getting by. And these guys — the billionaires and Trump — are making hay off of my suffering.” That’s what America is beginning to see. 

One of the silver linings on this dark period is that Trump has been so shameless and so the billionaire class around him have been utterly shameless. All this has actually emerged. It’s now revealed. It’s exposed. People can see it, and that’s changing American politics. 

AL: Democrats have been trying to tap into the frustration with the affordability crisis, the frustration with Trump’s corruption, and the connections that you’re saying that voters are making now. They’ve said that this is what they’ll focus on if they win control of the House, probing Trump’s corruption. But it feels like we’ve been down that road before. Is that the most effective use of their time, especially if what’s supposed to be a political weakness is, it’s becoming more so for Trump, but it hasn’t necessarily sunk him yet?

Obviously, he’s not on the ballot, though he’s telling people to pretend like he’s on the ballot, so we’ll see how that goes.  

RR: I wish he would keep on. I wish people really would take that to heart and think, “OK, he really is on the ballot.” Because I think, and most people, according to the polls, think he’s a disaster, a cataclysm, a catastrophe. So he should be on the ballot.

But I think you’re asking what should Democrats do when and if they get power back in the Senate and the House? I think that to some extent, there have got to be hearings, oversight hearings. I would bring in not so much Trump’s cabinet because they’re going to all say, “No, executive privilege. We don’t have to testify.” And we go go through endless rounds of litigation. No, I think they ought to bring in the oligarchs, bring in the billionaires, bring in Musk, bring in Jeff Bezos, bring in the Ellisons — Larry and David. What are they doing? Find out what the deals are in detail in terms of making America, the rest of America’s lives worse. 

Secondly, antitrust, as I said before. I think that has to be a big part of the Democratic platform and movement of the Democrats. 

Thirdly, Medicare for all. What I’ve seen, and I’m surprised and delighted because many of us have been working on this issue for 40 years. That is a single-payer system, is so much more logical. It is more efficient. Right now you’ve got anywhere from 8 to 12 million Americans who have lost their health coverage because of this administration. It’s absurd that we have a private for-profit healthcare system. Medicare for all has become, the timing is right for the Democrats to really push on Medicare for all. There are other things that I would like Democrats to do, but I think those are the highest priorities. 

[Break] 

AL: You mentioned AI, and I want to go back to this a little bit because this is a big force that’s shaping, midterms so far. And it’s also been one of the biggest issues animating voters. The frustration around data centers and the AI explosion. I’m not just talking about the conversation around AI and a looming far-off doomsday, but the anger with how AI is fueling hell on Earth today, conducting wars around the world, and as you mentioned, and enriching these companies that we’ve talked about, and also conducting surveillance at home. There’s been a massive public outcry against this industry. 

RR: And the and the data centers. Yes. Don’t forget the data centers. 

AL: Yes. 

RR: They’re guzzling energy. They are taking huge amounts of water in drought-stricken areas where the water is needed. They are loud, noisy. A lot of people who are Republicans in the rural areas of America, they’re saying, “We don’t want data centers. That AI stuff, no.” And Democrats are really doing well because of that. 

AL: We’ve seen this become a centerpiece of many of the successful primary campaigns and going well into the midterms as well. But to counter that public outcry, that public pressure, pro-AI super PACs are funneling record amounts of money, more than $100 million so far into our elections. I want to plug that my colleague Matt Sludge and I are conducting an analysis of this spending and spending by the pro-Israel lobby that we’ll publish in the coming weeks.

But Bob, what is at stake here? What can regular people do, as I know many of the people listening want to know to actually fight the influence of an industry that seemingly has endless resources to outspend its opponents? 

RR: Let’s all vote 10 days from 

AL: Now they’re specifically asking what can we do beyond voting?

RR: No, I understand. But Akela, first things first. 

AL: Oh, I know. 

RR: Let’s vote and make sure everybody we know particularly those who share our values, also votes. Because there’s no way we can actually control the oligarchy and AI, and really the oligarchs and the AI are very closely intertwined.

No way we can do that unless we have power, and the power comes through voting in 10 days. But then I think it is vitally important that Democrats, progressives look at AI and say, “Look here are the real problems with AI.” Number one, jobs. AI is on the verge of taking away huge numbers, not just hundreds of thousands, but millions of jobs.

What are we going to do about that? Are we going to prevent AI from doing that? Are we going to set up a re-employment system? Are we going to provide universal basic income? What’s the strategy, or what are the multiple strategies? Number two, AI poses an existential threat to humanity. How are we going to deal with that when you’ve got the right-wing saying, “Oh, we can’t let China do better than us and exceed us at AI?” What we have got to do is decide, here are the minimal regulations necessary for making sure that AI does not get out of control. We are going to demand this, and we’re going to work with China because China doesn’t want AI to get out of control either. 

Thirdly, we have got to do something about the AI war machine and make sure that the whole bizarre notion of autonomous weapons that are not in human control remain in human control, that we don’t want to move in that direction. That is as frightening as anything else I can imagine. 

I could go on and on. There is an AI agenda that progressives need to embrace, and it’s all related to power. I want to emphasize, if I may, that as we move toward this final showdown in America and in the world really, between democracy and oligarchy, one of the key areas where we are going to be battling is not just Elon Musk and Musk’s craziness and Donald Trump and Trump’s craziness, but it is AI and some of the issues connected to AI.

I’m sorry, I have to say one more thing, and I apologize for going on and on. 

AL: No please. 

RR: But we can’t forget the climate and climate change. AI and climate change are very closely related. One of the things that AI is endangering even more than it is already endangered is our climate.

I could get into more details, but I don’t want to at this point. The point is that we’ve got to maintain and keep our eye on what is really important in terms of maintaining social justice and humanity, and that’s really what’s at stake here. 

AL: I’m glad you mentioned the climate change issue because this came up a little bit in the primaries, the discussion around the fact that, back in 2020, the 2018 cycle, climate change, Green New Deal was a much bigger part of particularly progressive campaign platforms. Not that they weren’t campaigning on it, but it does really seem like this has transitioned into the conversation around AI, the climate conversation. As you said, they’re one and the same. 

But another group that has responded to public criticism of its efforts to buy elections by doubling down or trying to conceal its involvement is AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Facing massive outrage from the public amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and after spending $100 million to oust two outspoken critics of Israel from Congress last cycle, AIPAC shielded much of its spending in primaries this year through a network of shadowy pop-up PACs. While that was a shift in AIPAC’s most recent strategy, efforts to conceal the real source of money in elections is not new.

I will also note that earlier this week, AIPAC announced that it would stop endorsing and giving directly to candidates, though it will continue spending on elections through its super PAC, United Democracy Project. But what do you make of this phenomenon where groups like AIPAC or pro-AI PACs look at the mounting fight against them and they say, “OK, we’re just going to make it harder for people to figure out what we’re doing”?

Like, where do we go from there? 

RR: What we have to do is require that these groups reveal themselves for who they are. I mean, it’s absurd. It’s AIPAC, it’s crypto, it’s AI, it’s Trump’s MAGA Inc, and it’s obviously Elon Musk. When they try to disguise themselves behind these innocent-sounding names, “Pro-America,” “America Plus,” whatever it is and also disguise their identities by not even endorsing and pushing particular policies that they believe in, but the candidates who are going to carry their water that’s a matter of public disclosure.

It’s important that all of us — you guys and I and everybody I work with and everybody — that we expose what these people are doing, what these organizations are really doing. I think the candidates need to expose them because most people don’t want to vote for candidates who are really being financed by AI and by crypto and by AIPAC and by organizations that are anathema to their values. A lot of it is about disclosure. 

AL: You recently wrote criticizing the New York Times for reporting on the midterm elections with,, “false equivalencies.” I wanted to bring this up because this is something that’s in the ethos of how we approach reporting at The Intercept, but I think it’s interesting to talk about for a broader audience. What did you mean by those false equivalencies? How is the Times making a mistake in your view, and how can journalists avoid making the same mistake? 

RR: The New York Times I pick on only because it is the newspaper of record. It is the paper of record. It is the big kahuna, and we all respect it.

We’ve all been reading it for years. Thank God for The New York Times. But I think that because of its special role and its extraordinary importance, it has even more responsibility to avoid some of the deceptive practices, and I use the word deceptive advisedly that we see in the press generally, this false equivalency between the left and the right drives me crazy because there’s not a center, a respectable center between fascism and democracy.

We’re not dealing with equivalent issues here. Neo-fascism, or whatever you want to call it, is really a profound danger to all of us. It’s as profound an existential danger as is AI and climate change. If we don’t recognize it as such, and if the papers of record, if New York Times just is simply reporting on, for example, El-Sayed— The thing that really ticked me off was when it reports on El-Sayed and his his challenger or his opponent in Michigan, Rogers — I think his name is Mike Rogers — and tries to create the impression that the two of them are somehow equal in terms of their positions or the people supporting them or the social media supporting them. They’re not equal. They’re completely different. 

Rogers is on the side of authoritarianism. He’s a Trump supporter. I don’t want to get into the details, but just believe me, he is different. El-Sayed is really a progressive, and he believes in many of the things that we believe in, but also the New York Times has some responsibility to make that distinction. El-Sayed is a progressive who believes X, Y, and Z, and his opponent is a conservative reactionary, however you want to describe him, who believes in A, B, and C. We’ve got to see what they believe in and what they’re actually supporting, not just this false equivalence. 

AL: And the idea that it’s not just two sides of the same coin. Our team has done a lot of reporting on Islamophobia and all sorts of things that go into sort of this lack of a distinction in many mainstream outlets particularly between those two candidates. But we’re going to pause on that train and pivot now to some wonderful questions that we received from our audience.

Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. I will start with a kind of a fun— This isn’t fun necessarily, but it’s historical. If you like history, it’s fun. We now have the largest wealth disparity since the French Revolution. What can we as regular people do short of revolution to address this?

RR: I would not recommend a French Revolution type solution. 

AL: Just to be clear. 

RR: Just to be very clear. I’m not opposed to revolution. I think the American Revolution accomplished quite a lot and I liked Bernie Sanders’ political revolution. But I think that there is no substitute for political organization.

My granddaughter, for example, went door to door with her friends for Zohran Mamdani. New York is a different place now than it was because of that extraordinary political effort by so many people. We have the power because we have the people and the oligarchs don’t have the people. They have the money. 

And I think what all of us need to do is sharpen the understanding that we all have, that this is really a contest between the money and the people, the big money and average working people, the oligarchs and democracy. This is what this is all about. Let’s not forget it. 

AL: What federal government policies are most responsible for the obscene accumulation of wealth, and how can these policies be corrected? 

RR: Oh I would say three policies. One, monopolization. That is, antitrust, which was supposed to be there to break up big concentrations of wealth, has become a back burner issue, not just under Trump, but believe me, I’ve been watching this for 40 years. It has never had the degree of enforcement that it needs. Lina Khan did a good job at the Federal Trade Commission, and I commend her for it, and her colleagues but it needs Presidential backing. We need a Teddy Roosevelt going after the big combinations. 

Secondly, labor policy. We have got to make it easier for people to join unions. For years Democrats and Democratic presidents have promised that they’re going to make it easy just an up or down vote. If you want a union at your workplace, 51 percent yes, OK, you get a union. We have not had that labor law reform. We need labor law reform. 

The third area is taxation. We’ve got to raise taxes on the super wealthy. We’ve got to raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ve got to raise taxes on corporations, on big corporations. Instead, for years, not just under Trump, but for years, since Ronald Reagan, we’ve had tax cuts on the wealthy. We’ve subscribed to this nonsense called trickle-down economics that if you give big tax cuts to people at the top, somehow it’ll trickle down and everybody will be better off. That is baloney. That is utter rubbish. 

AL: This one is very timely given, as you mentioned, 10 days until the election, which really stressed me out, but it’s good to know. Do you feel comfortable that election offices across the country will be able to maintain a fair election considering Musk’s and Trump’s abilities and personal issues? 

RR: I’m not comfortable. I don’t think any of us should be comfortable. Look what he’s doing now — that is Trump — getting the Justice Department to sue in Alaska to not certify those votes if it turns out that the Democrat wins the Senate race in Alaska just because there are two people with the name Dan Sullivan who are running. They’re laying the groundwork.

Here’s what I worry about. I don’t want to be paranoid about this. But Trump and the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security are laying the groundwork for challenging election results and maybe doing even worse in terms of putting ICE agents at polling places, maybe even invoking the Insurrection Act. I hope not. But I’m trying to soothe myself. I’m trying to say, “It’ll be fine. 

AL: I get it. 

RR: “Don’t worry. It’s a very decentralized system. If they were going to try to do something like that, we’d see it already.” I’m trying to stay very stable and hopeful, but I am worried.

AL: I appreciate the honesty. This is what we need to be discussing and talking about. We can’t just turn a blind eye to it. 

One more question before we let you go, and I think this is a nice coda to this conversation. But will the midterms really make a difference since Trumpism seems to be a symptom rather than the disease itself?

RR: It’s a very important question. The midterms, if the Democrats take back the House, let’s say at a minimum, it will at least give progressive Democrats the beginning of a voice to lay the groundwork for 2028, when we really do have to take back America and the American government. What gives me some degree of optimism is that the trend line is in the right direction.

People, whether they call themselves Republicans or Democrats or independents, are getting angrier and angrier about all of the issues we’ve been talking about: the concentration of income, the concentration of wealth, the concentration of industry in terms of monopolization what this all means in terms of prices the foreign policy that is becoming more and more wacky, out of whack and also contrary to our principles, contrary to democracy.

What are we doing as Americans? How can we cozy up to Putin? Putin, if he’s not the worst authoritarian brutality, a brute out there, I don’t know who is. But we shouldn’t be doing this. We shouldn’t be sending any weapons at all to Israel. After the genocide and they’re continuing to commit genocide in Gaza.

No, we’ve got to stand for humanity and human rights and decency and democracy, and if we don’t stand for these, where is our moral authority in the world? We’ve got to be very tough on these issues because if we’re not tough internationally on these issues, how can we profess to believe in the things that are in our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the key documents of the United States?

We’ve got to get rid of ICE. We shouldn’t, cannot treat people who are immigrants to this country, whether they are documented or undocumented, we cannot treat them the way we are treating these people. This is analogous — it’s not the same — but it’s analogous to the way the Nazis began treating the Jews in the 1930s.

Once you open the door to that kind of bigotry and that kind of behavior, it’s very hard to close that door again. So we’ve got to stand up strongly, powerfully to the forces of bigotry. 

AL: We have much more that we could discuss that I would love to get into, but we’re going to have to leave it there.

Bob, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Reich’s work on his Substack. 

RR: Akela, my pleasure. Thank you. 

Jessica Washington: That does it for this special livestream of The Intercept Briefing, which you can watch on The Intercept’s YouTube page. 

Robert Reich’s latest book, “Coming up Short,” is out in paperback now. And his media company, Inequality Media, has a new documentary exploring how everyday Americans across the country are navigating our democracy in these times. It’s called “The Work in Progress.” You can find it at https://theworkinprogressfilm.com/. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Thanks to Lauren Schilli for help managing the livestream. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. 

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