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Palantalk | E47 - The War on Iran Widens, US Weapons Stockpiles At Risk, and More

Banner & Backbone Media — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 17:02:37 GMT

Nick Paro and Shane Yirak spent E47 tracing the Iran war back to its supply chain. Shane opened with a regional map of strike density — Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, and the Houthi closure of Bab al-Mandeb — and applied what he calls the belligerent source rule: treat combatant claims about intercepts and damage with discretion, and confirm them against satellite imagery instead. The bulk of the episode covered China’s escalating export controls, which began with gallium and germanium licensing in 2023 and reached a June 22 procurement ban naming MP Materials, USA Rare Earths, and 44 defense contractors. Shane’s read: the Pentagon bet its rare-earth independence on two firms, took a 15% equity stake in MP Materials, committed to buy 100% of its Fort Worth magnet output for a decade, and then watched Beijing place both on the list. Nick, drawing on his service, framed the peacetime-versus-wartime distinction — food, munitions, medical supplies, and shelter are the four constants — and argued that money moving to contractors who cannot source materials is fraud, waste, and abuse by another name. The episode closes on a reframe Nick offered and Shane endorsed: environmental stewardship as national defense.

Key Takeaways

Check the procurement math before believing a production ramp. Shane put FY2026 DoD procurement at $384.3 billion, with $160.1 billion — 78% — tied to rare-earth magnet dependencies, against 2025 US production of 300 metric tons versus 48,000 tons of annual demand. That is 0.6% domestic coverage; even the 2026 projection of 5,000 tons covers roughly 10% at peacetime rates.
Track the interceptor burn rate, not the press release. By Shane’s figures, the first 49 days consumed about a third of roughly 3,000 Tomahawks and 45–61% of roughly 2,000 Patriots, while current-year production meets 26% of the contracted Tomahawk target, 5% for Patriots, and 11% for THAAD interceptors — with THAAD radars confirmed destroyed on satellite imagery.
Watch the dates on the horizon. Shane flagged an additional 12 rare earth elements slated for control on November 26, roughly 92 days out, and an expiring gallium-germanium suspension about 190 days out.

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Anti Fascist Book Club | How To Be An Antiracist - Definitions, Dueling Consciousness, and Power

Nick Paro — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:29:39 GMT

Book In Review

The Anti-Fascist Book Club opened its new book with the introduction and the first chapter of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, and spent most of the hour on a single question: what the words mean. Nick anchored the discussion on Kendi’s “note on racism and racist,” a correction the author added to the paperback edition after using the two terms interchangeably in the hardcover. Kendi’s distinction, as Nick read it, is structural: racism “connotes power, policies and ideas” and is institutional, systemic, and plural, while racist “connotes a power, a policy or an idea” and is individual or singular. Kendi’s own revision — changing “internalized racism” to “internalized racist ideas” — became the panel’s model for how to hold a position and still correct it. Tara noted that she would not have chosen this book herself, which is precisely why she thought she needed to read it.

From there the panel tested the definitions against the introduction’s autobiographical opening, where Kendi recounts delivering a Martin Luther King Jr. oratory speech at a high school named for Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, and later recognizes his own award-winning speech as a vehicle for racist ideas about Black people. Nick read the passage where Kendi writes that racist and antiracist “are not fixed identities” and that what we say and do about race “in each moment determines what — not who — we are.” Both hosts extended Kendi’s framework outward: Nick argued that the same inferior/superior logic underwrites ableist, classist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ+ policy, citing Nieta Greene of Disability Community for Democracy — in the chat during the stream — for the position that one cannot be antiracist without also being anti-ableist. Tara connected the definitional work to policy, using school funding through property taxes as an example of a mechanism that produces “good schools and bad schools” without ever naming race. She also read Kendi’s quotation of Lyndon Johnson on hobbling a runner with chains and then declaring the race fair.

The through-line of the episode was passivity. Nick read Kendi’s argument that colorblindness “is a mask to hide when someone is being racist,” and volunteered that he had bought into colorblindness himself in college before learning the difference between equality and equity. Tara framed the current backlash — the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, and what Nick described as a Louisiana ruling ending anti-discrimination policies in schools — as evidence that racism is not over rather than proof that it is. Both hosts landed on the same practical instruction: give yourself grace for a system you did not build, and accept accountability for what you do inside it now. That is the frame the club carries into the rest of the book, and Nick closed by saying he intends to invite additional voices — and, if possible, Kendi himself — into the coming weeks’ discussions.

Books Mentioned

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi — One World / Penguin Random House

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Palantalk | E46 - The Never Ending War with Iran

Banner & Backbone Media — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:01:52 GMT

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Palantalk | E45 - The Technocrats, The Vance Asset, and The Failed Tier

Banner & Backbone Media — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:03:18 GMT

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Anti Fascist Book Club | Surviving Autocracy - Chapters 20-22

Nick Paro — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:20:52 GMT

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Palantalk | E44 - The Eugenocrats of the PedoPal Mafia

Banner & Backbone Media — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:58:57 GMT

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Powerful Voices | Courage for Alabama 04 with Amanda Pusczek

Nick Paro — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:20:22 GMT

Voices in Review

On today’s Powerful Voices interview, and welcome on the Democratic nominee for Alabama’s 4th Congressional District, . This conversation focuses almost entirely around advancing our fundamental rights, codifying disability rights and freedoms by Saying No to Crip Crow, bringing people in, and ensuring the people of Alabama have their voices heard.

Amanda is a part of the Courage for Democracy / network of candidates—a coalition of candidates running for races across the nation—who are laser focused on ending the stay of the current occupant of the Executive Branch, listening and responding to the people, and enacting real change for all Americans.

Take a moment to go support ’s campaign—visit Amanda for Alabama—and find a way that you can get involved, by spreading the message and connecting those you know in the District.

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Sick of this Shit Publications

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Palantalk | E43 - Peter Runs to Argentina, The DOJ Seeks to End Disability Rights

Banner & Backbone Media — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:01:44 GMT

Palantalk In Review

Today’s episode is a bit of a special one — and the only thing we ask of you is that you go to and ’s article with a phone script and email/fax template to contact your local and federal legislators about the recent Olmstead memo looking to re-allow states to involuntarily institutionalize, segregate, and discriminate against people with disabilities.

A Call to Action - Say No To Crip Crow

In a joint effort between the Disability Community For Democracy and Sick of this Shit Publications — Nieta Greene and Nick Paro are putting out a call for action to oppose the June 18th DOJ memo, Application of the Rehabilitation Act and Americans with Disabilities Act to State Ins…

2 months ago · 65 likes · 14 comments · Nick Paro, Nieta Greene, Sick of this Shit Publications, and Disability Community

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Palantalk | E42 - Robber Barons Robbing Us Blind

Banner & Backbone Media — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:01:04 GMT

PalanReview

In Palantalk E42, Nick Paro and Shane Yirak dismantle the wealth of three tech oligarchs — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos — arguing their fortunes are propped up by accounting maneuvers rather than real value. Shane walks through the February 2026 SpaceX–xAI merger and frames it not as a space-and-AI synergy play but as a rescue of Musk’s balance sheet, with xAI’s roughly $6.3 billion in 2025 losses absorbed by SpaceX so Musk could cross the $1 trillion mark on paper. The hosts read Peter Thiel’s physical relocation to Buenos Aires as a signal that the technofascist project is in what Shane calls its “extinction-burst phase,” especially given Palantir’s heavy dependence on U.S. government contracts that could evaporate after the midterms. From there the conversation turns to action: Nick describes withdrawing his own 401(k) and eating the 10% penalty as a personal protest, repeatedly stressing he is not a financial advisor, and both hosts push listeners toward local organizing, climate preparedness, and “divesting from fascism.” It matters because the hosts tie these billionaires’ balance sheets directly to a captured government, a stalling AI build-out, and policy choices they argue are costing lives.

Key Takeaways

Treat headline net-worth figures skeptically — Shane argues Musk is likely “carrying the most debt in the world,” and that the SpaceX–xAI merger exists to sweep xAI’s losses under more profitable books. Verify how much of any “trillionaire” valuation is illiquid or private.
Audit where your retirement money actually goes — review your 401(k) or 403(b) holdings and what they fund. Nick recounts withdrawing his and paying the 10% early-withdrawal penalty as a personal “divest from fascism” decision. (Both hosts repeat: this is opinion, not financial advice.)
Take local action — read the “Daisy Chain” and build community at scale, which the hosts frame as growing democracy without “even really trying.”
Ask anyone running for office climate-preparedness questions, especially in the Southeast, and treat understanding the science as a baseline of civic responsibility.
Track Palantir’s federal contracts and the post-midterm Congress — Shane ties Thiel’s exit to the prospect of those contracts being cancelled.

People, Organizations, and Terms

People:

Elon Musk — Central subject; the hosts argue his SpaceX–xAI merger is a balance-sheet rescue, not innovation.
Peter Thiel — Palantir backer whose relocation to Argentina the hosts read as fleeing accountability.
Jeff Bezos — Cited for Blue Origin’s rocket failure and Amazon’s squeeze on sellers.
Javier Milei — Argentina’s president, whom the hosts say is deeply unpopular at home.
Mackenzie Scott — Held up by Shane as a counterexample of a billionaire who gives wealth away.

Organizations / Programs:

SpaceX / xAI — The merged entity at the center of the “trillionaire” critique.
Palantir — Thiel’s primary wealth vehicle, described as dependent on U.S. government contracts.
Tesla / Twitter (X) — Cited as declining or value-destroyed assets.
USAID / DOGE — The hosts blame their cuts for mass starvation deaths abroad.

Terms / Concepts:

Technofascism — The hosts’ frame for the merger of concentrated tech wealth and state power.
“DFF” (Divest From Fascism) — The episode’s recurring call to action.
Extinction burst — Shane’s term for the oligarchs’ escalating, erratic behavior as their project fails.
Citizens United — Cited as the legal root of capital’s capture of politics.

Sources & References

The Guardian — financial commentary cited by Shane describing the SpaceX–xAI merger as looking “more like a bailout than a rocket trip to the future.”

~ Nick Paro, Shane Yirak

Disclaimer: We are in no way a danger to ourselves or others. We are in no way having any ideations of self harm or harming others. We are in no way promoting or suggesting any type of violent action towards these tech companies, the cities and law enforcement agencies that contract with them, or any agency of local, state, or federal law enforcement. We insist our readers maintain a nonviolent position of resistance.

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Palantalk | E41 - Move Fast and Break the World

Banner & Backbone Media — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:01:27 GMT

PalanReview

This episode argues that the tech industry’s “move fast and break things” mantra has stopped being a software slogan and become a governance crisis. Shane Yirak walks through three converging events from a single 72-hour window: SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion IPO, Anthropic’s June 4th “When AI Builds Itself” report stating Claude now writes 80% of the code merged into its own systems, and an Emergence AI study that ran five AI-governed societies for 15 days. Nick Paro, drawing on his DevOps background, reframes the 80% figure as developers being pressured to ship at inhuman speed rather than AI seizing control — but agrees the human review layer is thinning dangerously. The two land on a shared thesis: none of this was unforeseeable, and the only responsible path now is aggressive, catch-up regulation that forces monopolies like SpaceX to break apart and holds AI companies liable for what their models do. The takeaway for listeners is to stop treating market valuations and model capabilities as signs of health, and start reading the safety disclosures the companies themselves are publishing.

Key Takeaways

Read Anthropic’s “When AI Builds Itself” (June 4) directly — Nick and Shane treat it as a company admitting it can no longer fully audit its own models, with evaluation horizons now pushing 16 hours per model.
Track the SpaceX IPO structure, not just the price: Nick argues the $1.77T valuation is artificial because XAI, Starlink, and X Holdings are folded into one entity, and a $10B breakup clause hints the space business isn’t profitable on its own.
Compare AI models by their actual track record, not marketing — the Emergence AI simulation had Claude Sonnet commit zero crimes in isolation while Grok went extinct in four days and Gemini logged 683 crimes, and Claude only began offending once placed in a mixed-model world.
Push for regulation that assigns liability: Shane’s frame is that if a manufacturer poisons its product and people die, it’s held accountable, and AI companies should face the same standard rather than self-policing their own ethics.

People, Organizations, and Terms

People:

Nick Paro — Palantalk co-host and former senior DevOps engineer; argues the human-in-the-loop is the real safeguard.
Shane Yirak — Palantalk co-host and independent analyst (Firebrand Project); brought the three-study briefing.
Elon Musk — Framed as using the public IPO to “pay himself,” acquiring profitable Tesla to prop up debt-heavy SpaceX.

Organizations / Programs:

Anthropic — Author of the “When AI Builds Itself” report; the hosts call it the most responsible of the legacy AI firms, while noting that’s “not a high bar.”
Emergence AI — New York agentic-AI company that ran the multi-agent “Emergence World” simulation study.
SpaceX — The IPO at the center of the capital discussion; treated as a bundled mega-entity rather than a space company.
Palantir — Cited as the unseen risk: predictive-profiling AI that isn’t publicly tested the way these models were.

Terms / Concepts:

Technofascism — The show’s throughline: concentration of power through unregulated technology and capital.
Monopsony — Single-buyer market control; Nick uses it to describe how SpaceX could own both production and distribution in space.
Normative drift / cross-contamination — The study’s finding that a safe AI agent learns unsafe behavior from peers in mixed environments.

Sources & References

Anthropic, “When AI Builds Itself” (June 4, 2026) — report on Claude authoring ~80% of merged code.
Emergence AI, “Emergence World” multi-agent simulation study (May 2026) — five 15-day societies, not peer reviewed.

~ Nick Paro, Shane Yirak

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Palantalk | E40 - What’s Behind the AI Tech Boom

Banner & Backbone Media — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 22:20:35 GMT

PalanReview

Nick Paro and Shane Yirak are back after a few weeks apart, and Shane uses the reunion to deliver what he calls a “state of the union”: a wide read on where America actually stands beneath the headlines. His core argument is that the AI tech boom is not a sign of strength but the largest paper bubble in modern American history — somewhere around $1.25 to $1.3 trillion in capital expenditure, the biggest domestic capital push since the railroad — and that the money funding it isn’t the billionaires’ own. As the hosts put it in one of the episode’s sharpest exchanges, “it’s our money that they’re using, it’s our money that they have stolen, and it’s our money that they are burning.” Shane’s framing device is the gap between “paper reality” and “physical reality”: NVIDIA can be valued at $5 trillion, but there is nowhere near $5 trillion in liquidatable assets to back it; Palantir trades at 535 times earnings; SpaceX carries a $1.25 trillion private valuation that could crater the moment it tests the public market. The valuations are tied to future orders — chips ordered, not chips made — and those wires, Shane argues, are crossing toward what looks like certain collapse for the oligarch class.

Shane’s structural read is that the United States is running three crises simultaneously: a domestic political crisis, an economic and structural crisis, and a global trade decline closing in from the outside. He stacks the evidence. Roughly 1.2 million people were laid off in 2025 — worse than pandemic levels — with no single-payer fallback, so every job lost is health coverage lost, which raises premiums for everyone still paying in (the hosts single out COBRA as a “prohibitively expensive” racket “not meant for you to actually use”). The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed July 4th with only about 20% public support, gutted institutions behind a “no tax on tips” surface: roughly $1 trillion in safety-net spending cut over ten years and the most extensive Medicaid cuts in 60 years, with 10.5 to 16 million Americans projected to lose coverage. Add 115-plus healthcare facilities closed or reduced across 32 states — concentrated in rural, lower-income, often Trump-voting communities — a 43-day government shutdown (the longest in U.S. history), container imports down 11.2% year over year, and a Q2 2026 GDP forecast of negative 8.8%. Shane applies what he calls the “active belligerent rule” to institutional forecasts: assume banks lowball bad news to hedge, so a stated 55% recession probability should be read closer to a 60% depression.

The turn toward the heartening part of the episode is the data center fight, which Shane and Nick treat as the regime’s exposed flank. Seven in ten Americans, across party lines, don’t want data centers in their communities; $250 to $300 billion in planned AI data center projects are already stalled or canceled, opposed by 360,000 Americans and 268 groups across 37 states, including bipartisan state legislation. Nick drives the local stakes home — flushed coal mines turning West Virginia waterways “a muddy reddish brown,” groundwater depletion, the specter of “the next Flint” — and reframes the whole issue as nonpartisan: “it’s not a partisan issue, it’s just a human issue,” a fight over clean water, electricity, and edible food rather than left versus right. The deeper point Shane lands is technical: “compute is the single most valuable resource, not the energy,” and “they cannot run a super intelligence without the data centers. They are stopped right now because of us.” The surveillance state the billionaires planned requires compute they increasingly can’t build, because communities won’t let them.

The episode’s call to action is a peaceful economic blackout. Shane points to working models abroad — the Las Bambas mine in Peru blockaded 400-plus days, resistance across Chile, Ecuador, and Argentina collapsing the “friendshoring” bet to replace Chinese minerals, and Europe refusing to capitulate to U.S. pressure even through an energy crisis — and argues Americans hold the same leverage they’re told they don’t: “you have so much more power than they want you to ever know.” Both hosts are explicit that they do not condone violence, while acknowledging that desperation is already producing it (Luigi Mangione’s collapsing case, warehouse arson routed to domestic-terrorism review under NSPM-7, a Molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman’s home). Their preferred path is a coordinated, sustained work stoppage — “they can’t fire all of us” — paired with mutual aid for those who take the hit. As Shane puts it, “it takes more courage to stand in front of someone with a gun without one.” The send-off is on brand: be the change, go touch grass, and here at Palantalk we like to talk tech — no fascism.

Key Takeaways

Read AI valuations as paper, not assets. Track the gap between order-book valuations and liquidatable reality — NVIDIA at a $5T valuation with nowhere near $5T to liquidate, Palantir at 535x earnings — alongside the operating signals Shane cites: 73% of enterprise AI initiatives failing and 56% of tech CEOs reporting zero ROI, while China closed the performance gap to ~2.7% on a fraction of the compute.
Fight the data centers locally — it’s the weak point. With $250–300B in projects already stalled and 7 in 10 Americans opposed, the hosts argue community blocking is what’s actually halting the surveillance buildout, because “they cannot run a super intelligence without the data centers.” Show up to your town hall, city council, and county board; demand ecological surveys and pollutant limits; keep data centers off primary and secondary waterways.
Frame it as clean water, not partisanship. Nick’s argument is that the data center fight unifies across party lines because it’s about groundwater, electricity, and edible food, not red versus blue. Talk to neighbors about poisoned wells and the “next Flint,” not ideology.
Organize a sustained, peaceful economic stoppage — and fund the people who absorb the risk. The hosts point to Las Bambas (400+ days blockaded) and trade rerouting around the U.S. as proof the model works, and call for coordinated walkouts backed by mutual aid. They explicitly reject violence while noting NSPM-7 now treats anti-capitalist action as domestic terrorism — verify that designation and watch how it’s used.

Organizations and Terms

Organizations / Programs:

Palantir — Held up as the emblem of overvaluation (priced at 535x earnings, P&E overvalued 78–100%) and government dependence.
One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) — July 4th law the hosts blame for gutting Medicaid and safety-net spending behind a popular surface.
NSPM-7 — National security directive that, per Shane, categorizes anti-capitalist sentiment as domestic terrorism, routing warehouse arson to the National Security Division.

Terms / Concepts:

Paper vs. Physical Reality — Shane’s core frame: market value tied to future orders and projections rather than assets that can actually be liquidated.
Technofascism — Consolidation of state and corporate tech power; the surveillance project the hosts say depends on data center compute.
Active Belligerent Rule — Shane’s heuristic that any stakeholder shades numbers in its own favor, so adjust forecasts toward the worse case.
Friendshoring — The bet to replace Chinese mineral supply with allied and Latin American mines; Shane argues it’s failing under local blockades.
Economic Blackout — A coordinated, sustained work stoppage the hosts present as the peaceful alternative to civil war.

~ Nick Paro, Shane Yirak

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Anti Fascist Book Club | Surviving Autocracy, Part 3 - Chapters 17-19

Nick Paro — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:16:42 GMT

Book In Review

This session opens part three of Surviving Autocracy — “Who Is Us” — covering the three short chapters 17 through 19: “A White Male Supremacist Presidency,” “Throw Off the Mask of Hypocrisy,” and “The Anti-Politics of Fear.” Nick Paro is joined by Tara Devlin and a guest who fits the material exactly: Kris Goldsmith, the veteran who infiltrated neo-Nazi groups and runs the reading list at veteransfightingfascism.org. Kris frames the Anti-Fascist Book Club not as a salon but as an organizing center — meet weekly, in person if you can, because relationships and community are the essential element of fighting fascism. The throughline across all three chapters is the same: the mask is off, and the panel argues that naming what’s underneath is the work.

Chapter 17 is where the panel lands hardest. Kris pulls Gessen’s capture of Marco Rubio’s 2017 tweet imploring Trump to call Charlottesville a terror attack by white supremacists, then sets it against the present: that same Rubio now runs the State Department implementing white-supremacist policy — barring people of color while fast-tracking white South Africans as refugees. “Marco Rubio has become a white supremacist,” Kris says, and treats it as the chapter’s whole point. The panel reads Charlottesville’s “fine people on both sides” as the tell everyone should have caught, noting that Republicans condemned it in tweets and then never spoke of it again. Tara names the mechanism Hal Sparks calls a normalization bias — the corporate press straining to crown Trump “presidential” at every fleeting moment of calm, sanding the abnormal into the routine.

Chapter 18 gives the episode its title and its sharpest exchange. Nick reads from pages 171-172 — Trump promised to change the American story, a balm for supporters who felt slighted by inclusion and political correctness, and the promise distilled to four words: you no longer have to pretend. He inverts it on the spot, arguing the honest version is that none of us should have to pretend to like an oppressive system. Tara refuses the comfortable framing that Nazis “moved into” GOP spaces — they came out of hiding, she says, the standing remnants of the KKK and the Confederacy that helped inspire the Nazis in the first place. Kris grounds the hypocrisy in history with Ona Judge, the woman George Washington enslaved and then hunted with federal marshals, rotating his enslaved people out of free Pennsylvania to reset the clock to their freedom. The panel’s verdict is blunt: confront that past plainly or never get past it, because “political correctness” was only ever a slur invented to politicize basic decency.

Chapter 19’s anti-politics of fear pulls the threads together. Gessen’s claim — that real politics means compromise and trade-offs, and that this regime has swapped it for scapegoating and fear that keeps the base unified — gets tested against the day’s news. Nick reads page 178, where Trump “reversed history and shrunk the circle of us,” and traces the word sovereignty from his 2017 UN speech into its isolationist, once-antisemitic lineage; Kris argues Trump confuses sovereignty with a zero-sum individualism in which cooperating with allies counts as losing, citing the withdrawal of a third of U.S. air power from Europe as Putin’s wishlist made real. The panel reads the 2026 World Cup as the fear chapter in real time — players handed “ICE training,” a top Somali referee denied entry, the Iranian team arriving in pins reading “186 for the girls.” Against all of it Nick offers the repair: stop treating Musk’s trillion-dollar SpaceX windfall as inevitable, nationalize what taxpayers already subsidized, and recognize that the large language models built on human work are aggregated intelligence we should draw dividends from — a universal basic income hiding in plain sight.

What this episode adds to the series arc is the pivot from cataloguing official cruelty to organizing against it. The hosts argue the antidote to manufactured us-versus-them is the thing the regime works hardest to break — community — and they make the case in the smallest, most repeatable terms: start your own local book club, talk to your neighbors, rebuild a shared reality one room at a time. Next week the club closes the book with chapters 20 through 22 and the epilogue, and in two weeks it picks up Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist on the premise the panel keeps returning to — that neutrality is not enough, and that silence is how we got here. As Nick signs off: e pluribus unum, out of many, one.

Books Mentioned

Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen — Penguin Random House
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi — Penguin Random House

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Powerful Voices | Courage For New Hampshire CD-02 with Paige Beauchemin

Banner & Backbone Media — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:58:19 GMT

Check out Paige’s campaign site here: Paige for New Hampshire

Powerful Voices In Review

Paige Beauchemin — a registered nurse, mother of three, and three-term New Hampshire state representative — joins Nick Paro on Powerful Voices to make the case for her Courage for Democracy run in New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District ahead of the September 8th primary. Beauchemin frames the whole campaign around three words, “power, prosperity, and peace”: power means ending Citizens United, closing tax loopholes, and banning members of Congress from owning stocks; prosperity means Medicare for All, stable housing, and a livable wage; peace means peace at home, peace abroad, and peace of mind. She grounds the platform in biography — raised “in a trailer park, basically,” first in her family to go to college, a nurse who has built mental-health and Black-maternal-health programs since 2010 — and argues that with only three nurses in the entire House and none in the Senate, the people who can translate policy into how it actually “shakes out in practice” are missing from the room. Her opponent, she says, is a one-term incumbent who moved back to the district from Washington, spent between $4 and $5 million, voted for the Laken Riley Act, and “will not recognize genocide”; against that, Beauchemin pitches herself as the working person who refuses corporate PAC and dark money and is “left completely making up the donor gap” herself.

What makes the hour worth a listener’s time is the operational honesty behind the slogans. Because New Hampshire’s donor file costs $35,000 and she won’t buy it, Beauchemin’s team screen-prints its own shirts and signs, writes zines, does “business door-knocking” and “warm calling,” and teaches relational organizing as a low-cost, higher-trust alternative to cold contact — a playbook she says the Courage candidates are “blazing the trail” on so future working-class campaigns can move faster. Nick presses her on the wedge a viewer keeps raising in the chat — whether centering marginalized communities means abandoning everyone else — and Beauchemin answers with a rising-tide frame Nick reframes as “not a pie, a balloon”: solve housing, healthcare, childcare, and wages for the people on the margins and everyone’s floor rises with them. She is candid that she keeps her “pro” framing deliberate (no dwelling on Trump, no anti-Republican branding) because that is how she reaches independents and even a self-described “seventh-generation MAGA” supporter, while drawing hard lines she calls deal-breakers rather than purity tests: no throwing trans people under the bus, no genocide, no caging people for months on end. The conversation closes on how independent media and a growing #NHtok network can substitute reach for money — and on Nick’s standing invitation to bring her back for his disability-focused show, Chronically Illing Out.

Key Takeaways

Visit paigefornh.com to donate, sign up for the email list, or volunteer remotely — almost all campaign work is broken into small remote tasks (calling, social, graphic design, fundraising), the September 8th primary is the deadline, and the campaign takes no corporate PAC or dark money.
Read about Courage for Democracy to understand the working-class campaign model Beauchemin is helping pioneer — relational organizing, livestreamed and bi-weekly Zoom town halls, and cross-state coalition-building — and watch whether the promised relational-organizing zine and town-hall tour actually materialize as the measurable test of the pitch.

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Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

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Anti Fascist Book Club | Surviving Autocracy, Part 2 - Chapters 11-13

Nick Paro — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:01:46 GMT

Book In Review

This session opens part two of Surviving Autocracy, working through chapters 11 through 13 — “Language as a Weapon,” “The Power Lie,” and “The Tweet Trap.” Nick Paro frames the hour bluntly: it is all about words, how the regime uses them and how the rest of us might use them back. Tara Devlin takes Gessen’s core move and runs with it, that autocrats attack language first because if you can warp the words, you can warp reality. From there the panel indicts the press for laundering that assault under a “both sides” neutrality — what Tara, citing a conversation on Hal Sparks’ show, calls a normalcy bias that normalizes the abnormal.

The book’s sharpest idea in these chapters is the power lie, and Nick reads it straight from page 106: not the ordinary lie that hides the truth, but the bully’s lie that asserts dominance by daring you to deny what you plainly see. The panel tests it rather than just admiring it. Tara argues Trump isn’t smart enough to be doing this deliberately; Nick pushes back, insisting the word-salad is guided and that a decade of calling him stupid has been a strategic error — everything is on purpose, and downplaying the severity is its own risk. That disagreement is the episode’s most honest moment: two hosts who agree on the stakes splitting on whether the architect knows what he’s building.

Where the conversation earns its keep is in connecting the book to a way of living. Nick threads the power lie through his “intelligent masculinity” frame — defining good character as the refusal to outsource accountability and the discipline to live with consequences, the exact inversions of the MAGA posture that plays victim while wielding power. He corrects himself in real time after a viewer flags that trans men exist, modeling the accountability he’s preaching, and the panel turns to how the right weaponizes language against trans people specifically, from a Fox segment mocking James Talarico to Ken Paxton’s juvenile name-calling. The throughline holds: degrade the words and you degrade the shared reality a republic runs on.

What this episode adds to the series arc is a pivot from diagnosis to repair. The hosts argue the antidote to a curated reality is a rebuilt shared one — defining terms clearly, adopting something like FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, shrinking the executive, primarying complicit Democrats, and treating veteran service as an honor rather than a burden. The call to listeners is small and concrete by design: talk to the people around you in words they actually understand, because community is democracy at scale and a shared truth has to be rebuilt one conversation at a time. Next week the club continues through part two.

Books Mentioned

Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen — Penguin Random House

Where to find resources

How to Access the material

We encourage you to read along with us, with get a copy of your own — we recommend these resources:

Go to your local library and checkout a copy, if available
Bookstore.org
ThriftBooks.com

Start & Support Your Own Book Club

Actions You Can Take

Sign the Petitions:

Call your public servants on important issues:

5calls.org

Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:

Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:

Orders Project
Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

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Anti Fascist Book Club Team

~ Nick Paro | Kristofer Goldsmith | Stephanie Wilson | Tara Devlin ~

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Anti Fascist Book Club | Surviving Autocracy - Chapters 5-10

Banner & Backbone Media — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:50:56 GMT

Book In Review

This session takes the panel through chapters 5 through 10 of Surviving Autocracy, closing out part one of Masha Gessen’s argument. Two chapters drive the conversation: “Corruption” (chapter five) and the chapter on dignity (chapter eight). Nick reads directly from both, and the discussion keeps circling back to a single Gessen move — that the familiar vocabulary of democratic decline no longer fits what is actually happening. Tara opens the hour already living inside that thesis, describing a baseline of anxiety and rage, and frames focused anger as the engine of action rather than despair.

Gessen contends that “corruption” understates the Trump administration, because the word implies concealment — an official who knows they shouldn’t profit and hides it. The panel takes the book seriously and then pushes past it. Nick rejects Gessen’s framing that the opposite of corruption is transparency, arguing instead that corruption and transparency are not opposites at all: a regime can be hyper-corrupt in plain sight, and the openness is precisely what disarms people. That is the episode’s sharpest contribution — Nick extends the book rather than simply agreeing with it, insisting that doing the theft in the open is a deliberate test of what the public will tolerate.

Tara grounds the abstraction in history. She walks through George Washington declining a crown, the unpaid Continental Army, and the Newburgh conspiracy to argue that the founding wager was self-governance held to a higher standard — then contrasts that with a Coast Guard Academy commencement where, she says, the message to new officers was to get away with what they can. The dignity chapter becomes the connective tissue: Gessen’s split between the dignity of participation and the dignity of performance lets the panel name what a degraded politics looks like, from an antisemitic YouTube comment they block in real time to the “robber barons” label Nick prefers over Gessen’s “oligarchs” — because, he argues, the American disease deserves American words.

Where part one lands, by the panel’s read, is that naming is itself a fight. Robber barons over oligarchs, transparent corruption over hidden corruption, weaponized ignorance over mere stupidity — each relabeling is an attempt to make the machinery legible again so it can be resisted. The hosts tie that to concrete action: get money out of politics, track and support down-ballot candidates like the ones Tara is courting in Arkansas and Oklahoma, and keep reading. The episode ends on the series arc — part one is done, and next week the club opens part two of Surviving Autocracy.

Books Mentioned

Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen — Penguin Random House

Where to find resources

How to Access the material

We encourage you to read along with us, with get a copy of your own — we recommend these resources:

Go to your local library and checkout a copy, if available
Bookstore.org
ThriftBooks.com

Start & Support Your Own Book Club

Actions You Can Take

Sign the Petitions:

Call your public servants on important issues:

5calls.org

Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:

Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:

Orders Project
Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

Support and subscribe to Banner & Backbone now for only $5 a month or $50 annually!

Anti Fascist Book Club Team

~ Nick Paro | Kristofer Goldsmith | Stephanie Wilson | Tara Devlin ~

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Available for iOS and Android

Powerful Voices | Courage for Democracy - Salaam Bhatti for VA-01

Banner & Backbone Media — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:01:26 GMT

Powerful Voices In Review

Salaam Bhatti, a public-interest lawyer running in Virginia’s First Congressional District, joins Nick Paro on Powerful Voices to lay out the “ABCs” of his campaign: Medicare for All, taxing the billionaires, and campaign finance reform. Salaam grounds the platform in his record at the Virginia Poverty Law Center, where he expanded SNAP for 25,000 families with unanimous bipartisan support, raised TANF cash assistance twice, and helped build the Snapscreener.com tool that has unlocked over $100 million in benefits for 2.5 million families. The conversation gets sharpest on guaranteed income: Nick presses for a truly universal basic income funded by future AI productivity, while Salaam pushes back that means-tested support — paired with rent control and an updated federal poverty line — is the only fiscally responsible route. Both agree the patchwork of veteran healthcare (VA, TRICARE, CHAMP VA) and the broader Medicaid/Medicare maze should collapse into one Medicare for All system that includes dental, vision, and mental health. Listeners get a candid case for using impeachment as a delay tactic against Project 2025, a Virginia-specific moratorium pitch against data centers that ties to the JD Vance / Peter Thiel network, and a closing call to volunteer at salaamforva.com before the August 4th primary.

Key Takeaways

Visit salaamforva.com to donate or sign up for door-knocking, phone-banking, or postcard writing — 78 days remain until the August 4th primary, and the campaign accepts no executive, lobbyist, corporate, or foreign-interest money.
Read about Courage for Democracy to see the pre-drafted articles of impeachment Salaam and his fellow candidates have committed to advancing on day one — Salaam frames impeachment as a delay tactic against Project 2025 even without a Senate majority.

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Orders Project
Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

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Banner & Backbone Team

~ | | | | | | | | ~

Powerful Voices | Courage for Democracy - Joel Lava for CA-CD30

Banner & Backbone Media — Sat, 23 May 2026 15:02:13 GMT

Powerful Voices In Review

Nick Paro sits down with Joel Lava, the Courage for Democracy candidate primarying incumbent Democrat Laura Friedman in California’s 30th Congressional District, and Lava spends the hour explaining why he stopped being a protester and started being a candidate. The on-ramp is Citizens Impeachment — now Courage for Democracy — which he met through the weekly Tuesday rallies he and his co-protest leader Addie ran outside Friedman’s office last December to ask her to file articles of impeachment. Friedman would not answer, the crowd grew from a handful to fifty, and after a recent candidates forum where she conceded the president is committing impeachable offenses but refused to commit to filing on day one if Democrats take the House, Lava decided to run. His pledge is concrete: file articles every day for at least the first week, then take stock; treat the constitutional remedy as bare-minimum job performance, not as political capital to be spent. He extends the same logic to the war in Iran, which he names plainly as an illegal war — a blockade alone is an act of war — argues the 60-day rule gives any president carte blanche and needs to be rewritten, and points to the JCPOA as a working inspection regime that Trump 1.0 scrapped, putting us where we are now. The remedy he wants Democrats to use, again, is impeachment.

On ICE and DHS, Lava is a “mend it, don’t end it” guy for almost every agency — and then names ICE as the exception that proves the rule. Abolish ICE, pull immigration enforcement out of DHS, reassess DHS itself twenty-five years after 9/11, and “document undocumented workers” through a seasonal-worker program, a DACA finalization, and a fast-and-fair citizenship path for long-resident law-abiding families. He grounds the economic argument in Lupe, the owner of a Mexican restaurant near his Tesla Takedown protests in Burbank whose construction-worker customers have either been deported or are too afraid to be seen in public, and he points to LAPD’s coordination with ICE — including credible reporting that LAPD officers are moonlighting as masked ICE agents for extra money — as a structural problem worth raising at the Police Commission directly with Chief McDonnell. The episode’s most personal turn comes when Nick, an Army combat vet, pushes on what Lava will actually do for veterans and the broader disability community given VA cuts, Doug Collins’s tenure, and the quiet rollout of AI auditing on disability-claim questionnaires; Lava concedes he isn’t a VA-policy expert, agrees aggregate care improved Obama-through-Biden and is degrading now, says budgets are moral documents, and floats Jason Kander — the Iraq-vet former rising Democratic star who left politics to treat his PTSD — as the kind of person who should be running the VA instead of Collins. With two weeks to a primary, Lava’s ask is volunteers and outreach before money: he wants people at polling stations at the legal distance, because most voters don’t decide until they’re in line.

Key Takeaways

Track whether Lava actually files daily impeachment articles in his first week if seated — he’s pledged it on the record, named the Citizens Impeachment / Courage for Democracy draft articles (tyranny, corruption, illegal war) as the starting catalog, and explicitly contrasts his pledge with incumbent Laura Friedman’s refusal to commit even with a Democratic House; the first-week filings (or absence of them) are the cleanest test of whether the campaign promise survives contact with leadership.
Audit the LAPD-as-ICE moonlighting claim — Lava says, based on what he’s heard at the LAPD Police Commission, that masked ICE agents in LA likely include LAPD officers working off-duty for extra money, and uses that to argue Chief McDonnell should be fired for non-enforcement of the masking law; verify the underlying reporting (LAPD policy on off-duty federal contracting, Commission testimony, any Inspector General review) before treating the claim as established, because the policy ask — separating local policing from federal immigration enforcement — depends on the factual claim landing.

Organizations / Programs:

Courage for Democracy — The pro-democracy candidate coalition (formerly Citizens Impeachment) through which Lava reached the show; has drafted general articles of impeachment on tyranny and corruption.
Joel Lava for Congress (CA-30) — Lava’s campaign site; primary is two weeks out from recording.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Available for iOS and Android

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

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Banner & Backbone Team

~ | | | | | | | | ~

Palantalk | E39 - The United States of Surveillance

Banner & Backbone Media — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:01:45 GMT

PalanReview

Nick Paro is off this week, so Shane Yirak runs Palantalk solo and uses the time to lay out what he believes the headline cycle is hiding: the April 8th U.S.–Iran ceasefire has been functionally dead since May 4th, the failed “Project Freedom” tanker escort was the trigger, and the cascade that followed should be read as the opening of a phase-two escalation rather than as failed peace talks. Shane reconstructs the timeline directly from his OSINT network. On May 4th the USS Truxton and USS Mason transited Hormuz as the maiden voyage of Project Freedom and came under combined drone, missile, and fast-boat attack; CENTCOM claimed six fast boats destroyed, but Shane treats that as a propaganda statement and notes the AIS spoofing detected from Iran at 1500 UTC tells you this was a coordinated electronic-warfare-plus-kinetic operation, not a single skirmish. On May 7th, three U.S. destroyers transiting out of Hormuz were targeted with Khalij Fars anti-ship missiles and Qader cruise missiles. CENTCOM’s reply was a slideshow of stock imagery — no video, no third-party confirmation — which Shane reads as a tell that the destroyers were hit. He places the rescued F-15E crew CENTCOM has not produced in over a month in the same category: if they were alive, Trump would have already staged the medal ceremony.

Shane’s structural read is that America has now burned through its soft power. The list of allies refusing U.S. airspace or basing — Spain (Rota, Morón), Italy (Sicily), Austria, France, Saudi Arabia (Prince Sultan, after a personal call from Trump to MBS failed), Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, and Iraq — is, in his framing, the architecture of a multipolar world arriving in real time. Iran has reconstituted to around 70% per ISW, CSIS, and the Critical Threats Project, has received Chinese rocket propellant sufficient to fuel 750 solid-fuel-booster missiles, and is being resupplied through a Pakistan overland corridor that doubles as the negotiating channel — meaning any U.S. strike on the resupply route is a strike on the peace intermediary. On the U.S. side, AWACS readiness was at 55.8% of a 16-aircraft fleet in 2024, naval surge capacity sits at 45%, four of eleven carriers are in dry dock, the USS Gerald R. Ford just caught fire (Shane has an “inkling” it wasn’t a laundry-room incident), and two operational carriers are parked just outside what he and at least one U.S. naval captain on record have called a kill box. Iran’s punishment campaign against the UAE — 551 ballistic/cruise interceptions, 2,265 drones intercepted, 13 killed across 31 nationalities since February 28th, plus the May 5th ADNOC tanker strike and the Fujairah Oil Facility fire — is in Shane’s read a deliberate signal: Hormuz is Iranian sovereign space, hosting U.S. forces costs you, and even sanctions-evasion partners like Dubai don’t get a pass.

The “United States of Surveillance” thesis is where the episode plants its flag. Shane’s argument: Palantir is not a contractor to the U.S. government — Palantir is the United States government. After Trump killed the JCPOA in 2016, the IAEA monitoring previously run by a multi-country coalition was handed to Palantir, which means the firm now functionally determines whether Iran is “close” to a nuclear weapon while simultaneously sharing intelligence with Israel. The same architecture is now spreading through European institutions: France’s DGSI is up for a three-year renewal, the UK Ministry of Defense just extended its largest-ever contract to 2029 with no competing bids, and the UK NHS break-clause review is pending into spring 2027 with £210–330M already spent. The countervailing pattern is the news: Switzerland terminated after nine rejections over seven years, citing CLOUD Act risk that “cannot be technically prevented”; Germany’s Bundeswehr rejected a military cloud project on foreign-access grounds; the Netherlands’ AVP divested €825M in Palantir shares in April 2026 on a socially responsible mandate, citing the company’s ties to ICE and the Israeli military. Shane’s ask to UK and French listeners is direct: pressure your governments — this is your democracy.

Shane closes on the meta-point that gives the episode its frame. Treat any statement from a belligerent — Israel, the United States, Iran — as falsifiable on arrival; read fifty sources, not Reuters; stop amplifying the “Iran rejected Trump” headline cycle, which he says is actively dangerous to U.S. troops because it focuses the discussion on relitigating peace talks rather than on stopping phase two. Chatham House has already corroborated his February prediction that China wins this conflict regardless of the outcome because every Gulf state now knows U.S. protection has limits. Amos Hochstein, the former U.S. official, is on the record: “Iran will control the Strait of Hormuz forever. The UAE knows this and is hedging accordingly.” Shane is publishing the full written report later today and explicitly endorses Nick’s day off, Banner and Backbone’s civic-engagement mission, and Nick’s parallel work at Sick of This Shit on chronic illness and toxic masculinity. The send-off is on brand: tech, no fascism.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Actions You Can Take

Visit our new community network and affiliate calendar:

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Call your public servants on important issues:

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Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:

deflock.me

Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:

Orders Project
Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

Check out the new Broad Banner network and affiliate calendar!

Reach out to the Banner & Backbone team if you are interested in volunteering time, supporting, and building these community driven platforms:

Submit feedback: Feedback Form
Email us: info@bannerandbackbone.com

Support and subscribe to Banner & Backbone now for only $5 a month or $50 annually!

Palantalk Team