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.

Sick of this Shit Publications

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…

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

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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.

Actions You Can Take

Visit our new community network and affiliate calendar:

• Broad Banner

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

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!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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

~ Nick Paro | Shane Yirak ~

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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

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.

Actions You Can Take

Visit our new community network and affiliate calendar:

• Broad Banner

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

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!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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

~ Nick Paro | Shane Yirak ~

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

Get more from Banner & Backbone Media in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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

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.

Actions You Can Take

Visit our new community network and affiliate calendar:

• Broad Banner

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

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!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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

~ Nick Paro | Shane Yirak ~

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

Get more from Banner & Backbone Media in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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

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

Get more from Banner & Backbone Media in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Actions You Can Take

Check out our new shared community calendar:

• Broad Banner

Sign the Petitions:

• Demand Congress Subpoena Key Figures on the Epstein Case

• Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

Join the efforts to 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 BroadBanner network and affiliate calendar!

Donate to Feeding America, today!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

Subscribe now

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

• Submit feedback directly: Feedback Form

• Submit questions to: info@bannerandbackbone.com

Support and subscribe to Banner & Backbone!

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.

Actions You Can Take

Check out our new shared community calendar:

• Broad Banner

Sign the Petitions:

• Demand Congress Subpoena Key Figures on the Epstein Case

• Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

Join the efforts to 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 BroadBanner network and affiliate calendar!

Donate to Feeding America, today!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

Subscribe now

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

• Submit feedback directly: Feedback Form

• : info@bannerandbackbone.com

Support and subscribe to Banner & Backbone!

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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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

• Veterans Fighting Fascism

• Task Force Butler

• Bookstore.org

• ThriftBooks.com

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

• Veterans Fighting Fascism

• Task Force Butler

• Shop VFF for gear

Actions You Can Take

Sign the Petitions:

• Demand Congress Subpoena Key Figures on the Epstein Case

• Investigate Presidential Use of the Autopen for Pardons and Executive Actions

• Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

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

• safedc.info

• 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

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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 ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Banner & Backbone Media in the Substack app

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Get the app

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

• Veterans Fighting Fascism

• Task Force Butler

• Bookstore.org

• ThriftBooks.com

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

• Veterans Fighting Fascism

• Task Force Butler

• Shop VFF for gear

Actions You Can Take

Sign the Petitions:

• Demand Congress Subpoena Key Figures on the Epstein Case

• Investigate Presidential Use of the Autopen for Pardons and Executive Actions

• Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

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

• safedc.info

• 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

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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.

Get more from Banner & Backbone Media in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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.

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

Get more from Banner & Backbone Media in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Actions You Can Take

Check out our new shared community calendar:

• Broad Banner

Sign the Petitions:

• Demand Congress Subpoena Key Figures on the Epstein Case

• Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

Join the efforts to 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 BroadBanner network and affiliate calendar!

Donate to Feeding America, today!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

Subscribe now

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

• Submit feedback directly: Feedback Form

• : info@bannerandbackbone.com

Support and subscribe to Banner & Backbone!

Banner & Backbone Team

~ | | | | | | | | ~

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.

Get more from Banner & Backbone Media in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

Check out the new BroadBanner network and affiliate calendar!

Donate to Feeding America, today!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

Subscribe now

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

• Submit feedback directly: Feedback Form

• : info@bannerandbackbone.com

Support and subscribe to Banner & Backbone!

Banner & Backbone Team

~ | | | | | | | | ~

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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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.

Actions You Can Take

Visit our new community network and affiliate calendar:

• Broad Banner

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

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!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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

~ Nick Paro | Shane Yirak ~

The Anti-Fascist Book Club opens Book Five with the first four chapters of Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy, and the experience is immediately disorienting. Gessen wrote the book about Trump’s first maladministration. Nick and Tara are reading it inside his second. The panel covers Gessen’s opening analysis — Trump as a hollow figurehead who turns money into power and power into money, the press flattened into “a view from nowhere,” and the normalization mechanisms that made the takeover legible as politics-as-usual. What the hosts return to, over and over, is that the book reads like a manual for the present because the present is a repetition. Tara names the dynamic that animates the entire conversation: the fascism got entrenched because Democrats kept extending presumption of good faith to people who had given them, “against all evidence to the contrary,” every reason not to.

That framing reorganizes the rest of the hour. Tara walks through Gessen’s argument that journalism collapsed into stenography — reporters beaten into having no opinion, expected to read the lies straight, while the bullying of the institutions does the actual work of regime construction. The corporate media, Tara argues, is in the boat it is in because Trump’s “I can say what I want when I want, when I want to” became something to be transcribed instead of something to be confronted. Nick agrees but pushes the responsibility further up. He pulls Obama’s transition statement — the “presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens” line — and calls it “one of the biggest lies in American history.” This is the panel’s editorial position, stated plainly: Obama and the Democratic Party had the constitutional powers and the bully pulpit to name the actual crimes Trump committed to take office the first time. They chose the high road. The country has been paying the bill ever since.

The pair then push on the language problem that Gessen’s book exposes — and which the panel argues the American left still has not solved. Nick objects to the loanwords. The right’s American billionaires are not oligarchs; they are robber barons. The threat is not Russian or Nazi by analogy; it is Confederate by direct lineage. Nick locates the second Trump administration squarely in the neo-Confederate inheritance of the modern Republican Party, treats January 6 as the long-deferred raising of the Confederate flag over the Capitol, and argues that calling Trump a “Russian asset” is descriptive but calling the regime “Confederate” is mobilizing. The panel pulls Bacon’s Rebellion into the same frame: the original American technology for breaking cross-class solidarity was race, and the same lever is still being pulled — Christofascist white supremacy positioned against everyone else, including the white indentured class that thinks it is being protected.

Where the book ends in 2020, the panel extends it into 2026. Gessen’s account of the Reichstag fire as an authoritarian template becomes the hosts’ framework for reading the Hantavirus emerging across the South, ICE at polling locations, and RFK Jr. seated at the head of what Nick rechristens “Health and Human Sacrifices.” The argument is careful and specific: the regime did not manufacture the virus, but it will manufacture the response, suppressing spread in white-majority areas and accelerating it elsewhere, then invoking pandemic to justify cancelling or restricting elections. The panel is not predicting from nowhere; they are reading the book’s analytical pattern forward. Gessen identified the move. Nick and Tara are flagging the moment. They want the audience to flag it too — loudly, repetitively, and in American vocabulary, because the corporate press will not.

The closing turn is the call the series exists to make. Surviving Autocracy is a diagnosis, not a rescue plan, and Part One offers no save. Nick is clear about what that means: “Nobody’s going to come save us but us.” The work, as both hosts frame it, is to talk constantly about what is actually happening, to name treason as treason and traitors as traitors, and to build the communities that authoritarian systems most need to sever. That is the through-line for the whole book club, and it is the thread the panel will pull for the next several weeks as they work the rest of the book.

Books Mentioned

• Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen — IndieBound

Where to find resources

• Veterans Fighting Fascism

• Task Force Butler

• Bookstore.org

• ThriftBooks.com

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

• Veterans Fighting Fascism

• Task Force Butler

• Shop VFF for gear

Actions You Can Take

Sign the Petitions:

• Demand Congress Subpoena Key Figures on the Epstein Case

• Investigate Presidential Use of the Autopen for Pardons and Executive Actions

• Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

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

• safedc.info

• deflock.me

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

• Orders Project

• Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

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

Get more from Banner & Backbone Media in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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 ~

Subscribe now

Nick Paro and Shane Yirak open this episode with a thesis: every branch of the U.S. government is now running on a cronyism-and-nepotism revolving door, and the architecture is visible if you read the contracts. Nick reads the numbers into the record. Since Inauguration Day 2025, Palantir has been awarded over $1.3 billion in federal contracts spanning DOD, Homeland Security, Treasury, State, HHS, VA, Energy, Transportation, Justice, Agriculture, HUD, NASA, GSA, and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. In March 2026, the Army awarded Anduril Industries — backed by the Thiel Founders Fund and Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital — a $20 billion enterprise contract under a sole-source framework, consolidating more than 120 procurement actions into a single 10-year line that runs to March 12, 2036, covering its AI-enabled Lattice platform, hardware, and data infrastructure. Then the Trump-family ledger: Foundation Future Industries, where Eric Trump serves as chief strategy advisor, was awarded $24 million for “Phantom” humanoid military robots; Power Us, partly owned by Eric and Don Jr., is positioned for a $1.1 billion drone set-aside following the administration’s ban on Chinese-made drones; and Vulcan Elements, a 30-person startup in Don Jr.’s 1789 Capital portfolio, just pulled a $620 million Pentagon loan inside a $1.4 billion rare-earth-magnets deal. Nick’s framing: this is not a Venn diagram. It is one circle of four or five companies, all owned or funded by the same people.

Shane brings the structural read. Palantir is no longer a vendor to the United States government — it is a parasite embedded in every institution it touches, which means the DOD, DHS, and Social Security Administration cannot honestly be called public institutions anymore. He argues that depending on how deeply Palantir has integrated, some agencies may not be revivable and will need to be reconstituted: stripped down and rebuilt in a system that works. He also offers a counter-weight that the hosts come back to repeatedly: the contracts are mostly aspirational. With 45% U.S. naval surge capability (per Congressional testimony), both hospital ships in dry dock, depleted Tomahawk reserves, no domestic rare-earth supply chain, and the Pentagon mineral strategy compromised by the Iran blockade burning U.S. standing with Saudi Arabia, the material reality does not support what the contracts promise. Cronyism, Shane points out, is not about intelligent people making intelligent decisions — it’s the corporate assumption that supply chain is infinite and the only thing that matters is the top line. Meanwhile, Ukraine has weaponized that gap: its drone supply line is real, it can ship to the Gulf states within a week, and it’s signing mutual defense contracts and supply agreements while the U.S. tries to sell blueprints.

The episode is built around action, not just diagnosis. Nick lays out the playbook in three concentric rings. Locally: FOIA your city council and police department about Flock Safety cameras — Peter Thiel was an early investor and reportedly wants the company for the data-aggregation dashboard, which integrates into the Palantir stack. Electorally: it is primary season, and the Courage candidates network and Citizens’ Impeachment movement (citizensimpeachment.com, couragefordemocracy.com) is where progressive challengers are getting wired in. Nick is actively interviewing them — Brittany Jones for the Oregon governorship is on Wednesday with Rachel Marin asking constituent questions, Kira Havens drew a thousand-person live two weeks ago, and Walter Rhein and Will Fullwood are running the same playbook. The pitch is concrete: if non-voters turned out at even 20% above baseline, the MAGA voting bloc evaporates; at 50% it stops mattering what MAGA wants; at 90%, every sitting member of Congress who hasn’t pledged to do the right thing is gone. Hand-count the ballots. Internationally: U.S. citizens cannot purge Palantir from Palantir’s home country — its institutional capture is too deep — but other nations can, and Shane argues this is the leverage point. The UK is already reassessing its contracts after the Karp 22-point “Technological Republic” manifesto trended on Threads. Australia and the IAEA are next. Orbán just lost in Hungary despite controlling every lever of his government, because turnout was overwhelming enough that manipulation couldn’t close the gap. That is the model.

Shane closes with the line the episode keeps returning to: do not let the soldiers who died in Iran die for Trump. Let their deaths be the catalyst that puts people at the polls. Courage is action in spite of fear — not the absence of it. Nick wraps with the program note: more free subscribers to Banner and Backbone matter more than paid right now because the goal is reach; the Anti Fascist Book Club is back this Friday; and the new Powerful Voices candidate-interview series is the operational arm of all of the above.

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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 Team

~ Nick Paro | Shane Yirak ~

Nick Paro sits down with Mary Noone — Indiana-based progressive strategist, Hoosier Victory Alliance co-founder, and former Lululemon/Ivivva leadership trainer — and the hour is essentially a clinic on why down-ballot Democratic campaigns keep losing winnable seats. Mary’s diagnosis is structural: candidates are recruited as policy experts but never trained as marketers, so they launch with a checklist of platform planks and no positioning. Her fix is a four-week candidate training built around community mapping (list 8–10 issues that matter locally, then the orgs and stakeholders already working them), social-media listening to surface the actual language voters use, and values-based messaging that lets candidates in neighboring districts talk about the same issue — data centers, redistricting, child care — in ways that resonate with their specific community without sounding scripted. She uses Zohran Mamdani’s NYC run as the canonical example: affordability was his frame, listening for months was his method, and rent control, child care, and grocery stores were the issues that hung off the frame.

The throughline beneath the marketing language is what Stephanie Wilson calls “better humaning” — the argument that durable political coalitions get built the way Lululemon built community before opening a brick-and-mortar: show up at the women’s hockey game, host a panel on data-center development, give without expectation, and trust that the metrics arrive three to four months later. Nick presses on the time crunch — midterms and 2028 are both bearing down — and Mary’s answer is twofold: lift up the “how-to” actionable creators (Run for Something, her own Hoosier Victory Alliance) above the news-explainer top layer, and educate the public that campaigns need accountants, graphic designers, and event planners more than they need another door-knocker. Her closing pitch is for candidates to start now if they’re thinking about 2028, and to get on the waiting list for the messaging-guide tool she and her partner Josh are automating so candidates without staff can still find their North Star.

Key Takeaways

• If you’re a working professional who wants to help — accountant, graphic designer, event planner, book-club organizer — Mary’s argument is that down-ballot campaigns will accept that help directly and don’t have the bandwidth to recruit you. Pick a local race, email the campaign manager with the specific skill you offer, and watch how fast the door opens.

• Track the Indiana redistricting fight as a case study in values-based pushback. Mary credits the win to (a) eight to ten weeks of sustained ecosystem messaging rather than a single rally, and (b) reframing redistricting as “DC deciding for Indiana” — a frame that landed because swatting incidents had already crossed the Hoosier value of not hurting each other’s families. Watch whether other gerrymandered states can replicate the frame.

Organizations and Terms

Organizations / Programs:

• Hoosier Victory Alliance — The progressive 501(c)(3) Mary co-founded with Stephanie Wilson to fill Indiana’s communications-hub gap.

• Indiana Women’s Action Movement — Where Mary previously chaired and surfaced the recruitment gap for women and women of color candidates.

• Run for Something — Amanda Litman’s national candidate-recruitment org; Mary positions her own work as complementary “how-to” infrastructure.

• Courage for Democracy — Network of progressive candidates who pledge on a shared set of articles and the citizens-impeachment movement.

• Indiana Rural Summit — Indiana-specific work Mary mentions on rural messaging consistency across neighboring districts.

• Veterans Fighting Fascism — Chris Goldsmith’s anti-fascist book club model that Nick’s Anti-Fascist Book Club is built on.

Terms / Concepts:

• Community mapping — Listing the 8–10 issues that matter in a community plus the orgs and stakeholders already working them; the prerequisite to messaging.

• Values-based messaging — Anchoring positioning to community-held values (family, independent decision-making, trust, fairness) rather than party labels or polling demographics.

• Better humaning — Stephanie Wilson’s frame for relationship-first political organizing where metrics lag months behind the work.

• Give without expectation — Lululemon-leadership ethos Mary imports into campaigns: build community presence without demanding immediate volunteer or vote conversion.

• Trifecta — Democratic control of the House, Senate, and presidency in 2020; cited as the unkept promise that drove Gen Z disengagement in 2024.

• MAHA — Make America Healthy Again; Mary cites Trump’s fruit-flavored-vapor executive order as a small-but-delivered campaign promise that explains MAHA loyalty.

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Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

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~ | | | | | | | | ~

Nick Paro sits down with Erik Terwey, the Courage for Democracy candidate challenging Republican Josh Brecheen in Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District, and Terwey spends the hour translating progressive economics into language that works in a 22,000-square-mile rural district. He grounds his candidacy in his own biography — raised in OK-02, Teach for America French teacher in Tulsa, OU master’s, student debt and a 30-year mortgage he is not sure he can pay off — and argues nobody is fighting hard enough for people like him. His top issue is affordability: ending data-center sweetheart deals he blames for a 30% local electricity spike (against an 11% national figure), raising rural wages, restoring an education system he calls the worst in America, and pulling back from what he names as the “illegal war in Iran” because of how fossil-fuel and fertilizer prices flow through to grocery bills. On Native sovereignty, Terwey commits to introducing a day-one bill to seat the Cherokee Nation’s House delegate guaranteed by the Treaty of New Echota — a seat the nation has chosen and never been allowed to fill — and frames it as enforcing a treaty the U.S. signed, not granting a favor. He lays out his coalitions: Take Back Congress (term limits, overturning Citizens United, ending the Congress-to-lobbyist pipeline, banning congressional stock trading, an enforceable Supreme Court code of ethics), Citizens Impeachment, Mission for America, Men for Choice, and Progressive Victory. He is openly gay but deliberately keeps that off the website, arguing OK-02 voters respond to “fair” rather than “equity” or “inclusion,” and that the language the party uses in New York or California loses elections in the Ozarks.

What makes the conversation worth listeners’ time is the discipline of Terwey’s frame. He refuses to launder progressive policy as anything other than what it is, but he insists on translating it into the dialect of his district — fairness, work, faith, neighbor — and he is honest about why. He has very deep problems with the Oklahoma state party, real problems with the national party, and says plainly that the Democrats have not written him a check or sent him a volunteer. Nick presses him on how he would actually represent constituents from DC, on how he handles a suppressed-turnout electorate, and on whether his coalition pitch is more than branding; Terwey’s answer is transparency turned into a practice — weekly live streams, three-and-a-half-hour calls with single voters, and town halls during recess instead of vacations. The Cherokee delegate thread is the most editorially distinctive moment of the episode: Terwey credits fellow Courage candidate Brittany Jones for putting treaty law on his radar, and that cross-pollination is itself a useful signal about whether the Courage for Democracy network is functioning as a coalition or just a logo. The episode is a test of whether a gay, Democratic, treaty-enforcement, anti-data-center candidate can run an explicitly progressive economic platform inside the fourth-most-conservative district in the country and survive long enough to be heard.

Key Takeaways

• Watch Terwey’s day-one Cherokee delegate bill — the Treaty of New Echota guarantees the Cherokee Nation a non-voting House seat with committee votes and bill-submission rights, the nation has selected a representative, and no Oklahoma member of Congress has moved to seat them; treat the bill’s introduction (or absence) as the fastest measurable test of whether Terwey actually governs the way he campaigns.

• Audit the data-center deal claim — Terwey blames Oklahoma’s 30% electricity-cost increase (against an 11% national figure) on tax-incentive packages handed to data-center operators who employ a handful of permanent workers; track the underlying utility-rate filings and the specific tax-abatement agreements before treating the 30% number as settled, because the policy ask (ending the sweetheart deals) only lands if the cost causation does.

People, Organizations, and Terms

People:

• Erik Terwey — Courage for Democracy Democratic candidate for Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District; OU French-lit master’s, former Teach for America Union French teacher in Tulsa, openly gay; the guest. https://www.terweyforcongress.com

• Josh Brecheen — Incumbent OK-02 Republican congressman Terwey is challenging; cited for reading from cue cards at an August town hall and taking only a cursory question before leaving.

• Brittany Jones — Fellow Courage for Democracy candidate (running for Oregon governor) Terwey credits for surfacing tribal treaty law as a federal-policy lever.

Organizations / Programs:

• Courage for Democracy — The pro-democracy candidate coalition through which Terwey reached the show. https://www.couragefordemocracy.com

• Take Back Congress — 100+ candidate coalition committed to five day-one bills: term limits, overturning Citizens United, ending the Congress-to-lobbyist pipeline, banning congressional stock trading, and enforceable Supreme Court ethics.

• Citizens Impeachment — Accountability-focused candidate coalition Terwey says is ready to investigate constitutional-oath violations in any branch. https://www.citizensimpeachment.com

• Mission for America — Ten-year economic-transformation plan (newconsensus.org) Terwey has signed onto as a framework for clean, modern, broadly distributed prosperity.

• Men for Choice — Men’s coalition dedicated to restoring reproductive rights; does not endorse during primaries. https://men4choice.org

• Progressive Victory — Grassroots organization working to elect progressive candidates; Terwey is a member.

• Cherokee Nation — Sovereign nation whose Treaty of New Echota House-delegate seat Terwey commits to seating on day one.

Terms / Concepts:

• Treaty of New Echota — Pre-removal treaty between the Cherokee Nation and the United States that guarantees the nation a non-voting delegate in the U.S. House with committee votes, bill-submission rights, and full floor-speech rights — never seated.

• McGirt decision — The Supreme Court ruling Terwey cites as having reaffirmed tribal sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma; “settled law in my heart.”

• Fairness framing — Terwey’s deliberate substitution of “fair” for “equity,” “equality,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” when speaking to OK-02 voters; same policy, different dialect.

• Data-center sweetheart deals — Tax incentives Terwey blames for OK-02’s 30% electricity cost increase versus an 11% national average, with few permanent jobs in return.

• Day-one bills — Pre-written legislation Terwey and his coalition partners say they will file the day they are seated, as a contrast to “going there to learn how to govern.”

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

Actions You Can Take

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• Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification

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Join the efforts to 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 BroadBanner network and affiliate calendar!

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You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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~ | | | | | | | | ~

Nick Paro and Rachel Maron sit down with Brittany Jones, the Courage for Democracy candidate challenging Oregon Governor Tina Kotek in the Democratic primary, and Jones spends the hour translating progressive instinct into specific gubernatorial powers. She argues for a temporary state gas-tax suspension paired with a Secretary-of-State audit of ODOT, statewide expansion of CAHOOTS-style mental-health response, a housing-first approach she will fund from her own salary if the legislature refuses, and aggressive use of treaty law with Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes to block data-center expansion and Trump-administration logging approvals. She is explicit about confrontation with the federal government — referring ICE conduct to the Oregon DOJ, activating the state militia and National Guard to protect protesters, and coordinating with Washington and California to “fortify the West Coast” as a sanctuary for transgender, immigrant, and reproductive-care refugees.

What makes this interview worth listeners’ time is not the platform itself but Jones’s willingness to name the threat in plain language — fascism, white supremacy, government capture — and to accept the personal risk of doing so. She has raised under $2,000, lost her DoorDash vehicle, and tells her team to keep campaigning if she is arrested. The hosts press her on durability (income-tax flight, performance management, follow-through on past Oregon decriminalization) and on coalition-building with establishment Democrats; her answer is community-led oversight boards and constituent pressure rather than insider negotiation. The episode is a useful test case for whether a working-class, indigenous, grassroots-funded primary challenge can move the Democratic Party’s spine before the 2026 cycle.

Key Takeaways

• Track Oregon’s May ballot gas-tax measure and Jones’s proposed temporary suspension — her offset claim depends on an ODOT audit she has not yet seen the numbers on, so verify the audit’s existence and findings before treating the suspension as fully funded.

• Watch Jones’s use of treaty law as a template — if Oregon governors can credibly invoke the nine recognized tribes’ treaty rights to block data centers and federal logging approvals, that’s a tool other states could replicate, and the absence of its use today is itself evidence worth surfacing.

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

Actions You Can Take

Check out our new shared community calendar:

• Broad Banner

Sign the Petitions:

• Demand Congress Subpoena Key Figures on the Epstein Case

• Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

Join the efforts to 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 BroadBanner network and affiliate calendar!

Donate to Feeding America, today!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

Subscribe now

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

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~ | | | | | | | | ~

Nick Paro opens this Powerful Voices interview by welcoming Joseph Perez-Caputo — law student, former actor, former gardener, Sicilian-Boricua, and the Courage Candidate running to unseat Representative Jim Himes in Connecticut’s 4th District. CT-04 runs from Bridgeport down to Greenwich, through Ridgefield and Redding and all the idyllic New England towns in between, and Joseph moved back in with his mother in Stamford at 33 years old to run for the seat. That detail is not incidental. It frames everything else in this conversation: the man did the math, decided the district needed this, and went.

Before a single policy question, the episode gives real time to the mechanics of getting onto the ballot in Connecticut — and the picture is ugly. The state runs closed primaries, which means you either win 15% of delegates from Democratic Town Committees (people picked by the party infrastructure you’re challenging) or you petition. Joseph is pursuing the petition route. No one in Connecticut history has successfully petitioned their way onto the congressional ballot since the country was founded. The numbers explain why: he needs 2% of registered voters who voted in the last election — which translates to roughly 4,500 signatures, all from registered Democrats, all collected in 42 days, all meeting archaic literacy-law standards requiring cursive, specific ink colors, and a form the state doesn’t even release until April 28th. Modern campaign wisdom says double it. One previous candidate got close, had the state delay releasing his forms by three days, and then watched the court rule against him when he argued the delay was unconstitutional. Joseph knows all of this and is running the petition route anyway — because, he says, the petition is about the voice of the people. The delegates route would require him to walk back into a district he left during the pandemic and ask party insiders to hand him support. He didn’t want to do it that way. You sense he wouldn’t have respected himself if he had.

The policy section of this episode is dense and genuinely interesting. Joseph’s first legislative priority is a tax abatement program for residential and commercial property taxes, structured around converting lawns into native cultivar havens or community vegetable gardens — routed through local CSAs, farmer’s markets, and food pantries to eliminate food deserts. He built this idea out as a gardener a decade ago and has been waiting for the right moment to run on it. The ecological case he makes is real: existing research suggests that if most American lawns were converted to native habitat, the cumulative effect would approximate a 22 million hectare national park. The economic case is equally direct — prop up the gardening trade as legitimate skilled work, bring fresh local produce into grocery supply chains, and give communities a new category of economic participation. From there, the episode covers affordable housing (the luxury-apartment gentrification wave gutting CT-04), the AI revolution’s impact on labor (tech layoffs, energy usage, water consumption), and a genuinely open conversation about universal basic income as a mechanism for letting people change careers without a three-month gap in healthcare. Joseph is not a fan of AI. He wants regulation on what data it can access, what it can be connected to, and what it can be used to generate — including explicit deepfakes made without consent. His critique of AI mirrors his critique of social media: we failed to learn the right lessons the first time, and the greatest repository of social behavior data in history (Meta) exists entirely for advertisers, not for public benefit.

The sharpest section of the episode is on FISA 702. Joseph’s incumbent, Representative Jim Himes, has been the public face of pushing clean reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s subsection 702 — the mechanism under which, through the data broker loophole, the government can purchase commercially available data on American citizens without a judicial warrant. Himes fought hard for clean reauthorization, got pushed back by constituent pressure, wrote a 14-page amendment Joseph describes as a press release, and still didn’t close the loophole. Joseph’s critique is not rhetorical. He’s in law school. He explains the difference between legal terms of art and plain meaning rules, walks through how the phrase “commercially available data” has been interpreted to mean everything, and makes the point plainly: someone could be watching this conversation right now through a phone camera, and it would be legal. The fix he wants is twofold — class action restitution rights for citizens whose data has been breached or sold, and actual defined terms in the statute so that “commercially available data” and “acted with a foreign national” have precise legal meanings instead of acting as open-ended surveillance licenses. When Nick asks whether this warrants a constitutional amendment to enshrine data sovereignty and human protection into the Bill of Rights, Joseph says categorically yes — and notes that 12 years ago he organized an international protest whose central demand was exactly that: a constitutional convention and a constitutional restatement of rights for the digital age. The punk rock dude who wants to build a machine he doesn’t want to rebel against is already thinking at that level.

The episode closes on impeachment, and here Joseph is explicit that he holds the more aggressive position within Courage for Democracy. Impeachment is the floor, not the ceiling. What he wants is to pursue treason charges — under RICO, against the full network of business, NGO, and political machine actors — after the impeachments. He cites On Treason by Carlton F.W. Larson as the legal framework, draws a line from the Confederacy to the current president, and names Pete Hegseth’s alleged orders for extrajudicial killings as falling under the same category of accountability that would send a soldier to Leavenworth. He wants a full DHS review. He wants the new Nuremberg — and he says the first one wasn’t intense enough because of Operation Paperclip. He’s aware that saying this on camera is not safe. He says it anyway. Nick’s response is worth noting: he’s been saying the same thing on his own platform for some time, and he’s glad a candidate is willing to speak it out loud, because public opinion has to exist before Congress will act. Citizens’ Impeachment has been building exactly that — and Joseph is one of roughly 130 Courage for Democracy candidates already operating as a collaborative, pre-formed legislative block across 38 states. They have a policy matrix on the Courage for Democracy website showing nearly 99% agreement across issues. They’re not waiting to get elected to start working together. They’re already working.

Key Takeaways

• Connecticut’s ballot access system is designed to fail challengers. No one has ever successfully petitioned onto a Connecticut congressional ballot. Joseph needs 4,500+ signatures from registered Democrats, collected in 42 days, on a form the state won’t release until April 28th, following 150-year-old literacy laws. If you’re in CT-04, find him at JPC4CT04 and help collect signatures.

• The gardening tax abatement program is ready to become a bill. Joseph’s proposal — abating property taxes in exchange for converting lawns to native cultivar havens or community gardens — has ecological benefits at national scale (22M hectare equivalent national park effect) and economic benefits at the local level. It’s also the kind of policy that crosses partisan lines: lower property taxes, local food access, and skilled trade creation are not ideologically divisive asks.

• FISA 702’s data broker loophole means everything is commercially available. Your IP address, your phone camera, your communications with anyone in another country — all of it potentially falls under the current legal framework. Joseph’s incumbent is fighting to keep reauthorization “clean.” Joseph’s campaign is now primarily focused on defeating that effort and defining terms that actually protect citizens. Citizens’ Impeachment is tracking this fight and acting on it.

• Impeachment is the floor, treason charges are the ceiling. Joseph is explicit that he holds the more aggressive position within the Courage Candidate network — RICO charges, full network accountability, a new Nuremberg that goes further than the last one. Public opinion needs to exist before Congress will act. Say it out loud. Keep saying it.

• The Courage Candidate network is already functioning as a pre-formed congressional block. 130 candidates across 38 states, with a policy matrix showing ~99% agreement. The candidates who didn’t make the primary ballot are staying committed locally and will be offered staff positions if their peers win. Find the candidate in your district at couragefordemocracy.com and make noise before the advertising money arrives.

• The House of Representatives is the only branch that can create law. Joseph’s answer to the Supreme Court running renegade is legislative: go into the old cases, read the dissents and the dicta, find the reasoning, and write the bill that undoes the bad decision. Executive orders are suggestions. The Court can strike down bad law but can’t create new law. A functioning legislative body can undo everything the Court has enabled — if it does its job. That’s the argument for why the candidates in this network matter.

Terms and Concepts

• Closed Primary (Connecticut) — A system in which only registered party members can vote in that party’s primary. In CT, getting on the primary ballot requires either 15% of Democratic Town Committee delegates or a successful petition drive — both designed to be difficult for challengers.

• Petition Route — The path Joseph is pursuing for ballot access. Requires ~4,500 signatures from registered Democrats, collected in 42 days from April 28th to June 8th. Has never been successfully completed in Connecticut history for a congressional race.

• Tax Abatement Program (Agrarian Integration) — Joseph’s signature legislative proposal. Property tax abatements for property owners who convert their land to native cultivar gardens or community food gardens. Designed to eliminate food deserts, create a new skilled trade economy, and produce national ecological benefit.

• FISA 702 / Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 — The surveillance law that allows intelligence agencies to collect communications involving non-U.S. persons abroad. The data broker loophole allows the government to purchase “commercially available data” without a judicial warrant, potentially capturing U.S. citizens’ data.

• Data Broker Loophole — The mechanism by which private companies sell personal data to each other, and then to the government, without triggering warrant requirements. Joseph’s incumbent argues this is not addressed in the statute. Joseph argues that’s precisely what makes it a loophole.

• Citizens’ Impeachment — Nonpartisan grassroots organization working to force Congress to act on impeachment and accountability. Connected to the Courage for Democracy candidate slate.

• Courage for Democracy — Non-partisan candidate slate of 130+ candidates across 38 states running for federal office. Policy matrix shows ~99% agreement across candidates. Operating as a pre-formed legislative collaborative.

• RICO — The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Joseph proposes applying it to the current administration’s conduct, treating the full network of actors as a coordinated criminal enterprise.

• Ranked Choice Voting (Joseph’s Federal Proposal) — A federal bill Joseph would pursue allowing each party to place two candidates on the general election ballot, with ranked-choice voting determining the winner. Designed to expand democratic choice while respecting state control over elections.

• Constitutional Amendment for Data Sovereignty — Joseph’s long-standing position: data protection, biometric sovereignty, and human rights protections should be enshrined in the Bill of Rights, not left to statutory interpretation.

Sources & References

• Joseph Perez-Caputo Campaign — creatingcommunityeverywhere-jpcforcongress.org

• Courage for Democracy

• Citizens’ Impeachment

• On Treason — Carlton F.W. Larson (2019)

• FISA Section 702 reauthorization — ongoing legislative fight, CT-04

• Connecticut closed primary and petition ballot access requirements

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Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

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Nick Paro, Walter Rhein, and Will Fullwood open this Powerful Voices episode by welcoming Keira Havens — Air Force veteran, former scientist, co-founder of the Citizens Impeachment Coalition, and a driving force behind the Courage for Democracy candidate slate. The intro is warm and the military banter is real, but Keira gets down to business fast: she swore an oath to the Constitution, she’s taking it seriously, and she’s here because almost nobody in Congress is.

The backstory Keira lays out is both more organized and more infuriating than most people realize. In April 2025 — when polls were already showing 80-plus percent of Democrats, 40-50% of independents, and even 20% of Republicans wanting impeachment — the Citizens Impeachment Coalition launched with a single coordinated action: 600 people, one from every congressional district, sent an article of impeachment to Congress at the exact same moment. It worked. Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan’s 13th district incorporated their drafted article into a full impeachment resolution, filed it under Rule 9 (which forces a House floor vote within two legislative days), and brought it to a vote in under a month. Then Democratic leadership walked onto the floor and physically yelled at Thanedar until he pulled it. The first vote that did happen saw 79 members willing to take up the question of impeachment. By December, that number had jumped to 140. Only 47 Democrats followed leadership into the “present” column. The coalition reads this as a signal: leadership is isolated. The caucus is not with them. The movement needs to keep forcing votes until leadership can no longer pretend otherwise. Citizens Impeachment is still pushing for the next one.

The second pillar of this work is Courage for Democracy — the candidate replacement arm. If Congress won’t do its job, you replace the people in Congress. That logic produced a slate of 130-plus Courage Candidates across 38 states, running in 100-plus districts at the federal level, spanning both House and Senate races. Keira is clear on what “non-partisan” actually means in this context: it doesn’t mean bipartisan, it doesn’t mean splitting the difference, and it doesn’t mean she has any interest in what label a candidate puts on themselves. It means a shared standard — elected officials uphold the Constitution and are held to it equally — applied without exception and without carve-outs for team affiliation. The candidate interview playbook Walter and Courtney built (now live at broadbanner.com/candidate-interview-playbook) is part of this infrastructure: giving independent media creators the baseline they need to run a serious candidate interview and get something useful on the record.

The primary calendar is where this episode becomes immediately actionable. Primary season kicks off May 5th, with Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana all in the first wave. Louisiana’s Courage Candidate has already cleared her primary — her opponent dropped out, so she’s on the general election ballot. Georgia has Brianna Woodson and Case Norton, who Keira describes as showing up ready and willing to fight. California is a major target on June 6th, along with a batch of others. The math Keira lays out matters: a typical congressional primary turns out roughly 40,000 voters in a district where the general may pull 200,000. That compression means 100, 200, or 500 organized people can swing a primary. The movement doesn’t need to win the whole country at once. It needs to win primaries, one district at a time, with people who show up before the general and vote when it actually counts. Full candidate search by state and office is at couragefordemocracy.com.

Nick closes by pulling the two threads together on-screen — showing the BroadBanner resources page with Citizens Impeachment and Courage for Democracy links already live — and framing what the platform is for: getting serious candidates in front of audiences before the money decides the conversation. Keira’s assessment of what podcasters and independent media can actually provide is worth sitting with. It isn’t money, and it isn’t infrastructure. It’s taking candidates seriously, giving them a platform where they look credible, and asking them the question that the institutional media consistently refuses to ask: are you willing to fight? That question, Keira says, is the one that actually separates the candidates who matter from the ones who are just running for résumé reasons. All resources — Citizens Impeachment, Courage Candidates, the community calendar, and the candidate interview playbook — are consolidated at broadbanner.com/resources.

Key Takeaways

• Vote in the primary. Congressional primaries turn out roughly 40,000 people per district — roughly 5% of the total electorate. That compression means a few hundred organized voters can determine the outcome. Find your Courage Candidate at couragefordemocracy.com, learn when your primary is, and show up before the general.

• Track the impeachment vote count. The December House vote had 140 members willing to take up the question of impeachment. Only 47 Democrats voted with leadership against it. Watch whether the next vote moves that number above 150 — that is the threshold at which Democratic leadership can no longer hold the line. Citizens Impeachment tracks every vote and sends constituent action items directly.

• Ask every candidate if they’re willing to fight. Keira’s framework for evaluating candidates is simple: not how much money they’ve raised, not what party label they’re wearing, but whether they will actually use power when they have it. That’s the interview question that matters. If you’re hosting candidates on your platform, use the framework at broadbanner.com/candidate-interview-playbook.

• Primaries in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, West Virginia, and California start May 5th. The first wave of Courage Candidate primaries begins immediately. Louisiana’s candidate is already on the general election ballot. West Virginia’s Brit is running hard. California is the major June 6th target. Know who’s running in your district and make noise about it now, before the advertising money rolls in.

• Connect independent media to Courage Candidates. The most valuable thing podcasters and community platforms can do right now is give Courage Candidates a platform and treat them seriously. This doesn’t require money or infrastructure. It requires showing up, asking real questions, and getting candidates in front of new audiences. Reach out to Courage for Democracy to get connected with a candidate running in your district.

• The oath of office is non-negotiable. Keira’s framing is as simple as it is demanding: every member of Congress swore the same oath she swore in the Air Force — to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Courage for Democracy applies that standard uniformly, regardless of party, and will primary anyone who won’t keep it. That’s the entire theory of change.

Terms and Concepts

• Citizens Impeachment — Nonpartisan grassroots organization founded April 2025 with the goal of forcing Congress to act on impeachment. Strategy: coordinated constituent pressure, drafted articles of impeachment, Rule 9 filings. citizensimpeachment.com

• Courage for Democracy — The candidate slate arm of the citizens accountability movement. 130+ candidates in 38 states running for House and Senate seats. Non-partisan by design: applies a single constitutional standard to all candidates regardless of party. couragefordemocracy.com

• Courage Candidates — Individual candidates endorsed and supported by Courage for Democracy. Screened for willingness to uphold their oath of office and actually use power once elected.

• Rule 9 — A House procedural rule under which any member can raise a question of constitutional privilege at any time, forcing a floor vote within two legislative days. The mechanism the Citizens Impeachment Coalition used to get an impeachment vote to the floor in under a month.

• Non-partisan vs. Bipartisan — Keira’s explicit distinction: bipartisan means splitting the difference between parties; non-partisan means applying the same constitutional standard to everyone regardless of party. Courage for Democracy is the latter.

• Candidate Interview Playbook — A guide developed by Walter Rhein and volunteer Courtney for independent media creators who want to interview congressional candidates. Provides baseline discussion points and interview structure. broadbanner.com/candidate-interview-playbook

• Primary Math — A Courage for Democracy organizing framework: congressional primaries average ~40,000 voters per district vs. ~200,000 in the general. 100-500 organized voters can swing a primary. Primary voting has disproportionate impact and is where the movement’s electoral leverage is concentrated.

Sources & References

• Citizens Impeachment Coalition — citizensimpeachment.com

• Courage for Democracy — couragefordemocracy.com

• Banner and Backbone Community Resources — broadbanner.com/resources

• Congressional Candidate Interview Playbook — broadbanner.com/candidate-interview-playbook

• House impeachment vote tallies (first vote: 79 for; December vote: 140 for, 47 with leadership)

• April 2025 polling: 80%+ of Democrats, 40-50% of independents, 20% of Republicans supporting impeachment

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

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Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

Check out the new BroadBanner network and affiliate calendar!

Donate to Feeding America, today!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

Subscribe now

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• Submit feedback directly: Feedback Form

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Support and subscribe to Banner & Backbone!

Banner & Backbone Team

~ | | | | | | | | ~

Nick Paro and Shane Yirak open today’s episode with the clock running: the US-Iran ceasefire is set to expire in roughly 32 hours, and the negotiations in Islamabad are going nowhere. JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner are on the ground in Pakistan — none of them Senate-confirmed diplomats, none of them with constitutional authority to bind the United States to anything. Iran rejected the US negotiating framework before the ceasefire was even signed, and still the US accepted Iran’s terms. Shane reads that as a signal: something went badly wrong in the days before the ceasefire that forced the US into a weak position, and the two-week pause was about buying time for the second wave to arrive, not about making peace.

Shane tracks the force posture in detail. The USS Lincoln and USS Tripoli were the opening bluff — Iran called it, said they were ready, and they were. The USS George H.W. Bush and its carrier group are now the second wave, arriving into the ceasefire window alongside what Shane describes as the largest US naval armada assembled for this conflict: three carriers, assigned strike groups, two Marine Expeditionary Units, over a dozen destroyers, support ships, everything. The problem, Shane argues, is that this arrival coincides with a US military that is already degraded. Both hospital ships are in dry dock. Tomahawk reserves are critically low. The Pentagon is leaking precisely because people inside know the US is not ready for what comes next. Special operations forces sent deep into Iranian territory — in Shane’s reading, likely to seize enriched uranium — appear to have suffered serious losses, which is why the ceasefire happened at all. Losing that volume of special operators in enemy territory, he says, would be the single largest military defeat in modern US history.

Iran, meanwhile, is not standing still. Shane has been tracking a China-to-Iran resupply corridor running through Pakistan’s Belt and Road infrastructure, surging MANPADs and potentially larger air defense systems into Iran in advance of the ceasefire expiration. Pakistan’s current leader is an untouchable dictator with full unilateral authority, and the country has every incentive to hold leverage over India by controlling this corridor. The proof-of-concept for Chinese weapons tech is no longer theoretical — in the India-Pakistan conflict, Pakistani forces used Chinese air defense systems to shoot down Rafale fighters. The same category of systems is now flowing to Iran. Shane’s assessment: the Tripoli and Lincoln were the bluff; they failed. What comes next is the real war. And if the US expends its remaining military capacity here, Taiwan is next.

Nick pulls the thread back to the domestic economy. Gas is $4 a gallon in Arkansas and $6 in parts of the South. Federal minimum wage has not moved since Nick was a kid — still $7.25. The wage-to-gas-price ratio for workers in the South is worse than the same ratio in California at $6, because Southern wages are so compressed. There is no amount of Fox News spin that makes $4 gas feel like progress. The war is making the material conditions impossible to lie about, and that exposure is what the current political moment turns on. Nick also calls out Congress directly: Democrats need to file war powers resolutions and find Republican co-sponsors now, regardless of what AIPAC has bought. Ro Khanna should walk onto the House floor and read every name in the Congressional sexual assault defense fund — the slush fund of public money that members use to settle their own assault claims. If enough members resigned over credible assault allegations, quorum would break and snap elections would be required under the Constitution. Nick names names: Eric Swalwell, Tony Gonzalez, Ruben Gallego.

The episode opens with news Nick delivers before the main discussion: Evan Fields was fired from Lincoln Square the same day. Evan had published a detailed piece calling out major platform figures for holding zero paid subscriptions to smaller contributors — screenshotted, named, documented. He was fired by a board member who didn’t like the accountability. Nick invited Evan onto Banner and Backbone immediately as a public contributor. The Evan Fields story is not a sidebar to the episode’s larger argument — it is the same argument. Independent media consolidation, platform capture, and the economics of who gets to speak track directly alongside the question of who profits from the Iran war. Palantir gets richer. Halliburton looks like a footnote. BlackRock looks small. And the people doing the actual accountability journalism get fired for a hundred and fifty bucks a week.

Shane closes with the structural assessment: the ceasefire was not peace, it was a repositioning window. Both sides used it. The question now is who’s more ready. He does not believe the US is. The real war, when it comes, will produce the kind of mass casualty event that cannot be narratively managed — and the response from a fractured, nationalist-inflected US public will not look like the post-9/11 unification. It will look worse.

Key Takeaways

• Track the ceasefire expiration and who shoots first. The 32-hour window in this episode closes the ceasefire. Watch whether the US, Israel, or Iran initiates after expiration — and watch where. Shane identifies Lebanon/Hezbollah strikes and anti-ship ballistic missile salvos as the two most dangerous escalation pathways that Iran has not yet used at scale.

• Map the China-Pakistan-Iran resupply corridor. China is surging air defense systems — MANPADs and potentially larger — to Iran through Pakistan’s Belt and Road infrastructure. Verify this through cargo flight patterns, Belt and Road shipping data, and Pakistani arms transfer records. Pakistan’s use of Chinese systems to shoot down Rafale fighters in the India-Pakistan conflict is the proof of concept.

• Monitor US military readiness indicators. Both US hospital ships are in dry dock. Tomahawk reserves are critically depleted. The Navy is being decommissioned faster than it is being replaced. Verify through DoD budget documents, Navy decommissioning schedules, and Congressional testimony on munitions reserves.

• Demand war powers resolutions. Congress has sole constitutional authority to authorize armed conflict and appropriate war funding. Contact your representatives and demand a war powers resolution to limit presidential military authority in the Iran conflict. Find out whether your member has taken AIPAC money and whether they have drawn on the Congressional sexual assault defense fund.

• Follow Evan Fields. Evan was fired from Lincoln Square for publishing accountability journalism that documented major platform figures holding zero paid subscriptions to independent contributors. He is now a public contributor at Banner and Backbone. His work is a direct counter to the platform capture dynamic that suppresses independent voices. Subscribe and share.

• Connect the war-profit loop. Palantir, Anduril, and their investor class need this war to continue. That is not a conspiracy — it is their disclosed business model. A forever war in Iran is the profit event their valuations are built on. Track their DoD contracts, their lobbyist filings, and the policy positions of the people they fund.

Terms and Concepts

• The Blockade — The US seizure of Iranian oil tankers and closure of the Strait of Hormuz by US/Israeli forces; the proximate cause of this episode’s title and the central strategic escalation being analyzed.

• Second Wave — The USS George H.W. Bush carrier group and additional MEUs arriving in the conflict zone during the ceasefire window, completing the full assembled armada: three carriers, assigned strike groups, 12+ destroyers, support ships.

• MANPADs — Man-portable air defense systems; China is surging these to Iran through Pakistan’s Belt and Road corridor. Shoulder-mounted, proven capable of shooting down F-15Es and A-10 Warthogs. Iran has not yet deployed them at volume.

• Shahed drones — Iranian-produced loitering munitions; Iran has the capacity to launch 500 simultaneously and has not done so, indicating strategic restraint and conserved capability.

• Anti-ship ballistic missiles — Iranian weapons not yet used at scale in the conflict; a coordinated salvo against carrier groups represents the escalation Iran has held in reserve.

• Belt and Road Initiative — China’s infrastructure investment network; the corridor through Pakistan is being used to route air defense systems into Iran in advance of ceasefire expiration.

• Congressional Sexual Assault Defense Fund — A fund of public money used by members of Congress to settle sexual assault claims against themselves. Nick calls for public disclosure and forced resignation of all members who have drawn on it for credible assault claims.

• Abrahamic Fascism — Nick’s term for theocratic nationalism that weaponizes religious identity for state power — applied equally to Israeli ultra-Zionism and American Christian nationalism. He distinguishes this sharply from Judaism, Christianity, or Islam as practiced religions.

• Platform Capture — The process by which legacy media rebrands as independent media on platforms like Substack while continuing to suppress and underpay small contributors. The Lincoln Square/Evan Fields situation is the episode’s case study.

~ 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.

Actions You Can Take

Visit our new community network and affiliate calendar:

• Broad Banner

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

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

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

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

Check out the new Broad Banner network and affiliate calendar!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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

~ Nick Paro | Shane Yirak ~

Nick Paro and Shane Yirak argue that Peter Thiel has methodically purchased or gained control over vast swaths of American critical infrastructure—surveillance systems, AI companies, defense contractors, and health systems—leveraging his wealth to bypass constitutional limits on presidential eligibility by grooming JD Vance as a proxy. Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies, a CIA-backed surveillance and AI company with active contracts across military, intelligence, and health agencies, and co-founded Anduril Industries, which builds autonomous weapons systems. Nick walks through Thiel’s political spending ($20 million to Blake Masters in 2022, $15 million to JD Vance), his ownership of drone networks, and the downstream policy consequences—including a new AI fraud detection tool at the Veterans Administration that will screen out veterans from benefits. Shane emphasizes the “systemic rot” that warps the boundary between government and private power: Thiel is not building anything new, he is buying existing infrastructure and redirecting it toward privatized control. This episode cuts to the heart of why Palantalk exists—to track the individuals and systems that concentrate wealth and power at the expense of democratic accountability.

Key Takeaways

• Track Thiel’s infrastructure ownership. Palantir holds contracts with CIA, military, DHS, and HHS. Anduril builds autonomous weapons. Thiel owns major drone networks. Verify these contracts in public records and assess how privatization shifts accountability away from elected officials.

• Monitor the VA’s new AI fraud tool. The Veterans Administration rolled out an AI system meant to catch fraud in disability claims. It will also flag legitimate claims from veterans using third-party representation, screening them out as fraudulent and denying benefits. Document the rollout, the false positive rate, and the denied claims this generates.

• Examine the JD Vance grooming relationship. Vance received $15 million from Thiel in 2022 and has been mentored by him. Now Vice President, Vance can shape policy in areas where Thiel has financial interests. Compare Vance’s policy positions to Thiel’s business holdings and campaign donations.

• Watch for the Hungarian precedent. JD Vance went to Hungary and helped Orban lose the election, disrupting a decades-long conservative network project. This signals how far operatives will go to protect or reshape power structures. Track similar interventions elsewhere.

• Distinguish between innovation and privatization. Thiel does not invent—he buys. His model is to acquire government contracts and shift control to private hands while maintaining government funding. Look for other billionaires replicating this playbook in healthcare, energy, or transportation.

People and Terms

People:

• Peter Thiel — Co-founder of Palantir and Anduril, CIA-backed investor, JD Vance’s political patron; ineligible for US presidency because he is not a natural-born citizen but has installed Vance as proxy.

• JD Vance — Vice President, received $15 million in campaign support from Thiel in 2022, has worked under his tutelage; now positioned to advance Thiel’s policy interests.

• Blake Masters — Received $20 million from Thiel in 2022 for Arizona Senate campaign; reflects Thiel’s direct political spending model.

• Victor Orban — Hungarian Prime Minister whose network was disrupted when JD Vance intervened to help him lose re-election.

Terms / Concepts:

• Autonomous weapons — Military systems that auto-target and kill without human decision-making; Anduril builds these using Palantir AI.

• Systemic rot — The warping of the boundary between government and private money, where private individuals acquire control over public infrastructure while government continues to fund it.

• Infrastructure capture — The process of buying or obtaining control over critical systems (surveillance, defense, health) that governments depend on, shifting accountability from elected officials to private owners.

Sources & References

• Federal Election Commission (FEC) records for Thiel’s 2022 campaign donations

• SAM.gov and DoD contract databases for Palantir and Anduril contracts

• VA press releases and internal memos on the new fraud detection AI rollout

• CPAC and Hungarian political records for Orban network details

~ 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.

Actions You Can Take

Visit our new community network and affiliate calendar:

• Broad Banner

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

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

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

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

Check out the new Broad Banner network and affiliate calendar!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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

~ Nick Paro | Shane Yirak ~