Weekly Wrap | An Epstein Survivor Speaks Out, a Harvard Professor on Capitalism, & Christian Nationalists Claim Women Need Supervision

Welcome to another edition of the Weekly Wrap, Lincoln Square’s guide to all the shows and interviews you might have missed throughout the week.

Justice for Epstein Survivors | Jess Michaels joins Susan Demas LIVE

President Trump signed the petition to release the Epstein files but the American people are still waiting on justice for the survivors. One of those survivors, Jess Michaels sat down with Lincoln Square executive editor, Susan Demas, to discuss Jess’s clarity about the rage beneath the relief and making a first step toward transparency.

Susan Demas: I’m sure that you saw the comments from Megyn Kelly last week where she was trying to distinguish the line between being 15 or being 10 (pedophilia vs. ephebophilia), as though it’s somehow not as bad. But obviously, whether you’re 15 or you’re 10, you can’t consent to any kind of a sexual relationship. And even if you are an adult, you have the right not to consent. It seems so damaging, especially from a woman who has been so public about the sexual harassment that she’s faced, to make those comments to try and justify – to help a political ally – to have those arguments out there. I just found it to be incredibly damaging.

Is that something you and the other survivors have talked about?

Jess Michaels: We have, because we know that this is a really common tactic. So there’s a couple things that we see are going to happen. We see that victim blaming will increase. We know that mischaracterizing sex trafficking will increase.

This is a really important point to make: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s playbook of getting young girls to recruit other young girls is not unique. It is the exact sex trafficking playbook – Sex Trafficking 101 – that plays out in every town, in every state, at every socioeconomic level. So, he’s literally used the most basic playbook – it’s not special or unique to Jeffrey Epstein. It’s that there were all these wealthy people that participated, but it’s not unique the way that he and Ghislaine went about it.

People need to understand that about sex trafficking and the abuse that happens there and the fear. They can’t leave. You can’t leave safely. There’s no way to leave safely – not for yourself, not for your family. And they particularly fed on vulnerable young people. Either victims of child sexual abuse, victims of poverty, victims of no support system at home. It is the literal playbook of every single sex trafficker that’s ever happened in history.

See more of the discussion here.

‘Women Must Be Supervised’: The Christian Nationalist Doctrine Warping U.S. Politics | Andra Watkins & Sam Osterhout

Christian nationalism is a sickness that is infecting our country and there is no one better on the subject than Andra Watkins. She joined executive producer Sam Osterhout to discuss how this doctrine and the idea of ‘women must be supervised’ excuses hostility and trains people to mistake dominance for stability.

Christian Nationalist Podcaster *from clip*: “Women are atrocious today. They are immodest. They’re hoes. They’re dumb, like literally intellectually unintelligent. They are shallow. They are deceitful. They are wicked. They are vile. They vote for t—-. I’m not making it up. It is a 45, objectively, 45-point difference between young men and young women today. That’s where we’re at. Women are radical progressives.”

Sam Osterhout: So disgusting. I want to say that, for me, that could be the scariest Halloween costume that I could ever wear – because, I was like “oh, no… I kind of look like that guy.” That is terrifying. But, after we watched this in the green room, I was saying that if I met this guy in the store and he said this stuff, I would call security. It’s lunacy. And, a couple things: One, it feels like this claim to protect women is really about men trying to protect their own feelings, right? It derives from a weakness in my mind. Why would anyone like this spend their entire lives, all of their time, building a podcast studio and fleshing it out with producers and getting guests and doing all the work that goes into creating media, just to talk about how terrible women are?

What kind of weakness is this in you that compels you to do this? And it feels like, to a large degree, you say that they take the Bible literally. Does it feel like they read into the bible as justification for their own behavior?

Andra Watkins: I give some examples both in my newsletter yesterday and today. Joel Webin, who we just persecuted everyone with, is one of the examples that I give. I mean, he’s gone on the record as saying he won’t let his wife read certain books and he polices what she reads. I mean, he’s that much of an ogre husband. But he’s also the guy who said that if we just stoned a few women to death for accusing men of sexual assault and rape, then maybe we wouldn’t have these accusations that women are “falsely” making because they’re always false, because people like Joel Webin believe that rape can’t happen in marriage.

If a man wants sex, then he’s supposed to get it. And it doesn’t matter how the woman feels about it. That rape never happens. Doug Wilson, who we saw on CNN a couple months ago, whose pea, access mentor feels the same way – rape never happens in a marriage. So, some of these men have taken this Genesis 3, 1:6 to a vile extreme. There are even men more extreme than them who believe that physical punishment and violence against women is purifying to rape a woman and a necessary act to put her in her place and remind her that she is supposed to be subjugated by the man and submit to him. To honor and obey the man.

So there’s a whole cadre of influencers and guys on the far right who say things like this. I link to a number of them so that people can see them. Because if you don’t spend time in that world, this sounds crazy. It sounds like a conspiracy theory. It sounds like “who would believe these things and say them?” I provide a lot of examples in those newsletters because it’s really important to understand that this is where all of this comes from. It’s just a Bible story that a lot of people on this planet treat as a myth or an allegory or a metaphor, and not as something we should literally be living our lives by.

See more of the discussion here.

How Mamdani Charmed Trump in the Oval Office | The Weekly Assignment with Susan Demas, Sam Osterhout, & Evan Fields

This week, I (Evan Fields) was lucky enough to join our executive editor, Susan Demas, and executive producer, Sam Osterhout, on The Weekly Assignment. Susan and Sam discussed the topic on everyone’s mind at the beginning of the week, Trump fawning over Mamdani. The three of us also discussed Trump’s plans for escalations in Venezuela.

Susan Demas: I think that very few politicians can really pull of this dynamic. In contrast, we saw when Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was in the Oval Office and she realized she was being used as a prop, she famously put the binders across her face. Most of the time it’s very clear that Trump is in control, and when you’re a conventional politician, he knows how to work those people. So, I feel like you have to have somebody who has a certain skill level to pull this off. I can’t imagine your average member of Congress being able to go in the Oval Office and show up Trump like that.

I also feel like you have to build up a certain reputation before you go in there, like Mamdani has been able to do. He’s a pretty unique figure, and your average senator just doesn’t have that kind of personal following. But, I do think there is something to the idea of what we’ve been saying from the jump – don’t obey in advance. I mean, there’s no benefit whatsoever. It’s not like Zoran went in there and was like “You know what? I kind of think he’s got something here with the immigration policies.” He didn’t kneel before him and I definitely think that there is a lesson we can all take away.

Sam Osterhout: It is, and in our team chat (when that was happening), everyone was like “Why would Mamdani do this?” And we all had our own hot takes. But let me back up, it wasn’t a loss for Mamdani. He won. He won this round, or at least nobody lost.

Susan Demas: Yeah, I think there’s something to the idea that the last thing Trump wants to feel like is that he’s irrelevant. He understands that he’s not going to be here forever – he’s certainly been talking like that with the, “I hope I get into heaven,” kind of weird talk. So, I think that was kind of an undercurrent in their dynamic that he understands that. Mamdani is kind of the new hotness, and that’s always been appealing for Trump. The guy was a reality TV star; he gets that.

See more of the discussion here.

Deepfakes, Misinformation & More: How AI is Rewiring Politics | LIVE with Susan Demas, Nathan Sanders, & Bruce Schneier

Private incentives with the coding of AI are creating public consequences that already shape how power flows in our country. Open models like Switzerland’s suggest a path where AI development mirrors democratic values instead of corporate priorities. Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier push past a fixation on deepfakes to show how governance itself is rewritten in real time, in this discussion with Susan Demas.

Susan Demas: So in talking about regulation, are we already really behind on that? Because it seems to me that we are just trying to play catch up here with technology that is evolving extremely quickly with trillion dollar companies – it’s almost incomprehensible.

Bruce Schneier: We really are very late and we’re late because we didn’t regulate the internet because we didn’t regulate social media. Really, we are living downstream from the harms of our failure to regulate those industries and to allow those companies to become so big and so powerful. We’re in a position to control this next technological revolution.

You know, we have to figure it out. This is an issue that is bigger than AI technology moves fast and the companies don’t want to be regulated because that cuts into their profits. We as society really have a responsibility to act not only individually as consumers, but collectively as citizens and democracy and regulation is how we do that. But we do need to figure out, in general, how to regulate fast-moving tech. I mean, the places in the US where you get reasonably adaptive systems are the courts, which will look after case after case – but even that’s pretty slow. The regulatory agencies, which were going great until they’re hamstrung by the Supreme Court. And that brings us back to the states. The states are really the place in the US where nimble regulation can happen. That’s why it’s so important that states not be prohibited from acting in the technological space.

Nathan Sanders: I’d love to follow on to that with one more bit of bad news and one bit of good news. The bad news is that we are so behind in the US that we’re actually dragging other democracies behind with us. The EU made the first step globally in terms of large-scale comprehensive AI regulation with the AI act that they passed last year.

Of course, it’s not perfect. We have some specific critiques of it in our book, but it’s a major step forward and it represents the first tip of the spear of AI regulation globally. However, the implementation of the EU AI Act is being stalled and challenged by pressure from the U.S. trying to resist those kinds of controls on U.S. AI and big tech companies. I think that represents a global risk to regulation.

There is some good news here, as Bruce was just highlighting. We are, even if we’re not acting at the federal level in the U.S., we are acting at the state level. Some states have adopted, maybe not AI regulations as comprehensive as the EU’s AI Act, but are taking meaningful steps to constrain the potential harms produced by companies leveraging the technology. I think it was encouraging that over the weekend, representatives, leaders of a number of states, including Republicans of the same party as the executive – Ron Desantis in Florida and others – came out opposing the idea of a state-level moratorium because they recognized that there’s bipartisan consensus in many cases around resisting corporations creating harm from this technology. I think that suggests that we could get to a better place with our federal politics in the U.S. on this issue.

See more of the discussion here.

Fred Wellman, Missouri Congressional Candidate and Lincoln Project Alum, Joins The Strategy Session

Army veteran, West Point Graduate, and Lincoln Project Alum Fred Wellman is now a Congressional candidate to take over the seat in Missouri’s 2nd District. Missouri has a shifting political terrain because of the national collapse of trust in Republicans and he sat down with Rick Wilson and Joe Trippi on this week’s The Strategy Session to discuss how Fred plans on making the lives of Americans better in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District.

Rick Wilson: Folks, I think one of the things about Fred you should know: he is a guy, when you ask Fred to go run through a brick wall, he will run through that wall. He will clean up the mess after and run through the next brick wall. He is going to work his ass off in this district. And I think that’s one thing, you know, Fred – your work ethic here in this campaign is something that’s really impressed people. It’s like you’re going out, you’re organizing to run for Congress, but you’re working with the folks running for a state Senate, state House, local seats, all to build up a farm team and build up a movement – not just a single campaign.

Fred Wellman: That’s exactly right. You know, the challenge we have here is we are in a super minority here in the state house. So that means the Republicans basically can just, they don’t even need to vote. They don’t even need to talk to the Democrats. They pass what they want. It just happened with the redistricting when they jammed through Trump’s central redistricting message.

So, if we can flip just three of our house seats and just a few others, we can break that super majority. Here in CD2, Missouri is one of those giant state houses, right? We have 26 house districts within my congressional district. If we flip just three – and there’s 10 that are on the cutting edge right now – if we flip three of those, we break the super majority. So the power to truly change the direction of our entire state lies in this district.

I’ve been going to all the electeds, what I call down-ballot, the senators and the House, even the county, and say, “let’s work together,” let’s make sure if I’m in your district, you’re going to be there with me. If you need me to appear at an event, I’ll come do that. If we work together, if we show people who we really are as Missouri Democrats, I feel like we could change the state just in this district. This district, I think, is ground zero for how we’re going to turn Missouri around in a very real way in this race, and the midterm is the perfect time to do it.

It’s like going to war, right? You build a coalition, you get your allies, you get your joint force, you fade. And that’s how I’m approaching this, I can’t do this alone and I’m not in this alone. So if we can do it together, then all rising water raises ships. And that’s always been my philosophy. I mean, you remember when I worked at the Lincoln Project. That is responsible leadership. We built partners to get our job done. That was a coalition that defeated Donald Trump.

See more of the discussion here.

The Next Level of Trump’s Threats | NY-17 Candidate and Army Veteran Cait Conley Joins Anchor Watch with Bobby Jones

Every veteran leaves the service with a clear sense of how fragile our way of life really is. That’s why Army veteran Cait Conley is running for Congress in New York’s 17th District. She understands what it has taken for this country to survive and grow for 250 years – and she sat down with Bobby Jones to talk about her next chapter of service on this episode of Anchor Watch.

Bobby Jones: Going back to when you were at West Point, you’re training hard to prove that you’re worthy to lead Americans abroad to keep Americans safe. And ladies and gentlemen, for those who don’t know, what this woman has done is the elite of the elite – and as a woman doing it, which Hegseth has said all these ridiculous things – you are the counter example, living flesh example of him being completely wrong.

On the flip side of that, you do all of that to come home and to see us being torn apart from within from the people that are supposed to motivate us to be better. What led you to take the uniform off, take off the expertise that you have, because you’ve done more than your fair share and then say, “I want to go do this, too.”

Cait Conley: So, Bobby, I think the same reason we raised our hand so many years ago to say, “send me,” is I want to get out there and fight and defend this nation that I love. It’s the same reason that I raised my hand to jump into this fight – it’s out of love. Love for this country that we are privileged to call home and the firm belief that for 250 years, ordinary people in extraordinary times met the moment to live with courage, to put this country on the track to be the nation we are. And it is now our generation, our watch, to fight to keep it. And I’ll be damned if we’re going to lose this fight on our watch. We have fought too hard, sacrificed too much, lost too many friends to watch politicians, on both sides, lead this country off a cliff.\

I think the American people are sick of it, we’re sick of it. We just want serious people – true leaders of character – who are going to put country before party and people before politics to solve the whole problem facing our nation. It’s not complicated. It really is that simple but we make it hard.

Bobby Jones: It seems like we keep failing an open book test. That’s what I’ve been saying to people. So, when you look at the national landscape as a candidate for the United States Congress, what bothers you across the spectrum? What bothers you the most? And then, what do people in Hudson Valley feel like is affecting them?

Cait Conley: Where I think I am incredibly fortunate in so many ways, is the Hudson Valley is such an awesome representation of larger America. When you look at my congressional district now, it’s four counties. Twenty-eight percent of registered voters are unaffiliated or independent. So a Democrat or Republican can’t just win this district with just their own party alone, right? You’ve got to get people, you’ve got to get the voter to choose you as a person over a party, and I love that. I wish more of America was like this because I think we got to get back to the place where politicians are trying to earn the vote and the respect of the people they’re seeking the privilege of representing.

When I look at this country, if you and I were having this conversation a year ago (before Trump started his second term), I would have looked you in the eye and said, “Bobby, I am really concerned for America and our future right now because we have some really hard problems in front of us that we are not effectively solving, and we’re not even addressing in the full way we need to be.”

And what I mean by that is, for the first time in modern American history, the economic prospects of young Americans are worse than their parents or grandparents. We are facing a national security risk landscape that is more complex than we have seen. We’ve got Iran that can’t even get water to its second largest city, but still doubling down on its commitment to develop a nuclear weapon. At the same time, they’re providing one-way UAVs, one-way suicide drones, to Russia to support the invasion of a sovereign democratic state, Ukraine. Now that land war and the last several months just spilled over to Russian incursions into the sovereign airspace of NATO allies.

See more of the discussion here.

Have Dems Turned a Corner? If We Want to Win in 26, Let’s Hope So | LIVE with Lisa Senecal & David Pepper

School vouchers have been one of Trump’s major policy positions since he entered politics. David Pepper shows how the fight over those vouchers cuts across party lines because “why would I ever want my dollars to go to a private school hundreds of miles away?” He joined Lisa Senecal on this live interview to discuss that and more.

Lisa Senecal: I’m so glad you’re focusing on this from a perspective of what is good for our democracy, because it seems like part of what has enabled so much polarization to take root is that Democrats and Republicans are only speaking to their own people. And how could we possibly not become more polarized when in communities, we’re not talking to one another if we think that there’s going to be political disagreement? We don’t have candidates going into counties on either side. The messages just never, or rarely, mix. And if we aren’t having a greater conversation where everybody feels better informed and safe being able to have these conversations. I think it’s people not wanting to create more discord in your community or not to be fighting with your neighbor. We have to all be having these more open conversations and challenge each other, challenge candidates, but do it in a way that doesn’t necessarily look backwards. We need to return to some civility and move forward in ways that we haven’t thought of before and how we’re going to be communicating with each other and getting information from our politicians and holding them accountable – because we’re failing on all fronts.

David Pepper: There’s a very small group of people, very powerful, and one of the best weapons they have is to divide everyone against each other. And if we’re only in some places and they’re in other places, it’s so much easier. If we are out running in more places with, let’s say a public school teacher who is the candidate, they taught their (that community’s) kids. It’s a lot easier in that person’s mind to say, “that’s a good candidate.” It’s a lot harder to do the divide and conquer stuff that they rely on.

Elon Musk is another one to keep us mad at each other while they dominate us economically. It’s a lot easier for them to do that if we are not in half of America. It’s a lot harder if we actually have very good, respected people who are in communities like those teachers and principals of Robertson County. Let’s imagine them as a candidate. I don’t know if they’re going to win, but when they’re running and saying “Hey, I’m running to protect the same public school we all protected with our vote in that referendum,” people go, “Oh, okay. I see that.”

There’s a guy I just talked to who said he’s going to run for the statehouse from Williams County, Ohio. If you look at the map, it’s the far northwest corner of Ohio. He’s a very respected business guy. He’s a long time Republican who said a few years ago, “I’ve had enough.” He’s helped a lot of people in that community through his business, through other civic things he’s done. Great candidate.

Now they’ll try and turn him into something he’s not, but he is a respected community member of Williams County. He’s the kind of candidate that when he runs, I think it just puts us on the map in a way that the stereotypes they like to throw at Democrats, it’ll defy that. I think by being out everywhere in public, really helps us stop their divide and conquer nonsense. When done right, it’s very effective. It’s just getting everyone hating each other enough that we don’t see that actually, when I bring up public schools, higher costs, and healthcare – you can talk about that in any part of America and people will say it’s affecting all of them. They don’t want us to see that. They want us mad at each other enough that we don’t stop all those things from happening to us.

See more of the discussion here.

It’s Black Friday. Let’s Talk about Capitalism. | First Draft with Susan Demas & Harvard Professor Sven Beckert

Lincoln Square’s executive editor and host of First Draft, Susan Demas, was joined on this week’s episode by Harvard professor, Sven Beckert. This Black Friday episode dove right into capitalism. The system with roots that stretch across continents shaped by merchant networks which predates Europe’s rise has grown to something we could have never imagined.

Susan Demas: One of the most fascinating arguments that you make is that capitalism wasn’t actually born in Europe, that it emerged in a global sense out of various struggles. Can you talk with us a little bit about that? Because I know that runs counter to the history that most of us learn.

Sven Beckart: Yeah, most of us (including myself), we were taught a history that, when it came to the economic history of the world, was very much focused on the European continent and maybe to some degree also on the United States. It was a history, as we all remember, it started out with the Medici and Florence, it might have touched upon Genoa and upon Venice, and then we move up to Amsterdam and the merchants of Amsterdam before we talk about the merchants of London and then we talk about the emerging industry in the 18th and 19th century in places like Manchester and then maybe when we get to the 20th century, we cross the Atlantic Ocean and we come to the United States in places like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and of course New York City. And this narrative emerged in the 19th century, and it is a narrative that at the moment when it was produced, reflected some real historical accuracy.

The world was actually, at this point, very much focused on the European continent. But if we look at the world today, no one in their right mind would talk about the world economy and only talk about the European continent and maybe a little bit about the United States. You would immediately be drawn to, at the very least paying a lot of attention to, what’s happening in Asia. But, if you are a little more sophisticated, you would also look at what’s happening in places like Nigeria or Brazil.

So, to understand the world economy today, we must not look just at the European continent. And that, I think, necessitates also rethinking the history of capitalism – because how are we going to explain the present if we think that the past is literally just about the European continent?

Once you rethink the history for capitalism from a global perspective, and I think that’s one of the most important contributions of this book, to think globally about capitalism, what you see is that these well-known merchant communities of Florence that are clearly important to the origins of capitalism, but they were not unique (by far). There were such merchant communities in other parts of the world. For example, the book starts in the Arab world, in the port of Aden (present-day Yemen) which was a kind of thriving port with a thriving merchant community who dealt with counterparts in India and on the east coast of Africa. I write about these communities of merchants in China and India and East Africa, West Africa, and of course in Europe, because these European merchant communities were clearly important as well.

So, when we think about what I consider to be the beginnings of this economic logic that is capitalism. When we think about that, we find that (merchant economy) in many different parts of the world. And thus, the early story of capitalism, clearly we can only understand from such a global perspective. The book shows that at any moment in the history of capitalism in its entirety, you can only understand this history by embedding it within a larger global narrative, even at its most Eurocentric moment. One of the most Eurocentric moments in the history of capitalism is the Industrial Revolution – which does begin to unfold on the European continent, especially in British oil. In a way, that is very local history and we need to understand that history (and even local history) which is embedded in the trade of cotton textiles in India, the turning of land in the Americas to cotton plantations. It’s linked to the enslavement of Africans to work these cotton plantations. It’s also linked to global markets because by 1850, already half of British textile production went into Indian markets. So even that most narrow moment in the history of capitalism in which Europe really does play a very important role, even that moment can only be understood if we embed it within a larger global story.

See more of the discussion here.