Phone A Friend: Francesca Fiorentini.

Max: Okay, Unf*ckers, this isn’t our first conversation, but it has been a while, and I am oh so delighted to bring Franny Fio, Francesca Fiorentini, the leader of Frantifa, back to the show. Francesca, hi.

Francesca: Hi, Max. Thanks so much for having me.

Max: Dude, I have so much to ask you, because my head has been buried in the sand with economic bullshit, and I need to get pulled back into the political scene, like, fast.

Francesca: The political bullshit, you know. We’re sort of double dunking the head, waterboarding yourself between the economic and the political bullshit. I get it. Someone’s got to be in the economic bullshit, though, because I feel like that’s the real story. If the midterms are favorable for Democrats, so much of the destruction that has been wrought under these four years—or only two years—of Trump will fall on the Democrats’ watch. And because Americans have the memories of gnats, that’s not going to be like, that all started under Trump, all that is attributable to a permanent tax break for the wealthiest Americans. And it’s like, no, no, I’m gonna go back to the fascist guy. It’s very important, actually, to leave ourselves these breadcrumb trails when it comes to the economy. So thank you.

Max: Oh yeah, my pleasure.

Francesca: [Laughing] Sure.

Max: [Laughing] Doing the Lord’s work.

I don’t know if this is annoying to you or not, because this is a trademarked Bitchuation Room thing to start off a conversation with a bitch. I have one, and it’s so specific to you.

Francesca: Oh.

Max: I know.

Max: I’m gonna hold back on that for a second and just ask you first: Is it okay for you to share a bitch on UNFTR?

Francesca: Share a bitch. Well, I am a bitch, and I’m sharing. Yeah, what I’m bitchuating on, dude. The bitchuation is it’s 95 degrees in Los Angeles in October. We are coming out of a three- or four-day heat wave. That’s what they call it. I couldn’t remember the word for the nice thing. Wave. It just feels like heat-pocalypse, that hasn’t been seen since 1987. And this city also is reliant on fossil fuels. It’s very ironic that Donald Trump recently said that Iran could just take out L.A., because Iran’s already kind of taken out L.A. when it comes to our gas prices. It’s insane.

We’re looking at like $6 a gallon—$7 back in, like, spring, depending on where you were. I was driving through Beverly Hills, and obviously, fuck those guys. No, but seriously, it’s so expensive, and it’s just wild that we have some good politicians, we have some good ideas, but actually, when it comes down to it, Democrats, all politicians in this state, are absolutely clueless as to how to combat and actually be prepared for the climate catastrophes that are coming our way. And it’s wild, what a lack of imagination, what a lack of—I mean, honestly, a state of emergency that we should be in at all times, and we’re simply not. It’s terrifying. And of course, we only have Super El Niño to look forward to. So that is what I’m bitching about.

Max: Yeah, can we stop naming it after a baby? It’s El Niño. It sounds so adorable, but when it comes through, it’s pretty fucked.

Francesca: Yes, yeah, absolutely. That El Niño is eating. It’s just like one of those Jerry Springer El Niños, nothing but McDonald’s, you know. The mom’s like, “I don’t deprive my kid of anything,” and you’re like, “oh no.” It’s like that El Niño. Remember that kid? I feel like he was some kid in the Philippines who smoked like five packs of cigarettes a day. Remember that dude? That guy. That’s what El Niño is like. And I’m sure that guy ruled.

Max: So it’s interesting that you mention climate change, because as I’ve been stuck in all of this economics reporting for the past year and a half, the one inescapable reality is that no matter what economic model you put forward, none of it factors in this looming existential—very real and also happening right now—threat. We are not modeling it in any way, shape, or form. And one of the things that I always talk about is how there was a Navy report from the 1990s. Naval scientists, they’re just scientists, and their job is to go be like, okay, this is going to happen at this time. They had taken all of the geological data that they had gotten—probably from ExxonMobil, that they’d buried—and figured that by now, right now, there would be parts of the world that were simply disappearing, because their recommendations were: we need to start moving these 30 bases, because they’re going to be underwater. And it was done in such a clinical, matter-of-fact way, because it was like, “hey, we’re fucking up the climate,” so these things are going to be basically new disaster threats with mass migration. The fact that these installations aren’t even going to be here. We should—that’s the old Navy.

Francesca: That’s the woke Navy, Max. Now we got the unwoke Navy. But what Pete Hegseth is rolling back—you’re exactly right. You’re talking about way earlier, but the military has said this multiple times. We have all these bases, they’re in pretty precarious locations, often climate-wise, and they’re going to take on water fire, whatever, fire and ice. This is going to start happening. What are we going to do to prepare for it? And that was then treated by the Trump administration as being woke and being trans or whatever the hell, right? And it’s like, all right, at your own peril, my guys. As if they think they can take their money with them. They’re all gonna die just like us. They’re not gonna take any of it with them.

The last thing I’ll say on this—it’s one of those three in the morning thoughts where you’re like, look at this rollout of data centers. Look at what is possible in unison when there is this sort of broad consensus. Now, mind you, it’s all money driven. That’s how the consensus happens, and that is the fallacy, I think, of climate change readiness and sort of stopping it, is by saying we have to make the economics make sense for the billionaires to want to invest in renewables. That’s bullshit. I’m just looking at the private and federal consensus to have massive infrastructure programs, and it can be done, but now it’s being done in the worst way possible. Something that’s going to hasten the effects of climate change. But it could be done if you’re saying this is a priority. Make this happen. You have the tools, whatnot. But again, there’s not a buck in it, and so it is just devastating.

I mean, the ultimate—when you talk about climate change and economic systems, capitalism is incompatible with a habitable planet. Period. I guess I am a socialist. I don’t go around saying I’m a socialist necessarily, but you have to be a socialist if you’re literally just a realist, if you want to survive on this planet. Naomi Klein has said this over and over again. You are a socialist, and Fox News knows this. The only people that don’t know this are Chuck Schumer and Democrats.

Max: Apparently, yeah. A friend of mine just became a pastor of a church in Hakeem Jeffries’s district, and I was like, oh, this is good. Invite him in. Let’s have a conversation. Maybe I can finally get an audience with this guy. You know what, we’re going to hit on that in a little bit, because—

Francesca: Sure, let’s do it.

Max: I’m confused, I guess is the right word, about basically where the right is fusing with the center left, which is fusing with the liberal left against the so-called far left of the party, and I just want to unpack some of those dynamics with you. But first, my bitch is this: this week on Thursday, I am going to Brooklyn to see you and that enormous thing you call a husband perform comedy at The Bell House in Brooklyn.

Francesca: Hell yeah!

Max: Now I’m super excited. I’m super excited. However—

Francesca: What’s the problem?

Max: Here’s the problem. In 1900-something—

Francesca: Okay.

Max: —Long Islanders, we sold Brooklyn to the city, because we’re like, fuck this place, it’s useless, we don’t need it. It’s the bottom. That’s where the garbage. It’s like the corner of the potato chip bag where the crumbs gather, and it’s all dirty and sticky in there. Because I am what they call a FLID. I’m a fucking Long Island douchebag, and that’s what they call me, and that’s okay. And I own it. I’ve been here long enough to be institutional. I remember when it was—

Francesca: Bridge-and-tunnelers. I mean, we don’t have to—

Max: Yeah, bridge and tunnel. We’ve had every name in the book thrown at us. And my problem is this: because I’m a FLID, I live in the car culture. It’s very difficult for me to navigate mass transit down to Brooklyn. It’s also impossible to park down there. But I am going to risk my very sensitive, fragile suburban life and limb to come see you in this place that we discarded oh so many years ago in Brooklyn. So you’re getting me out of my comfort zone. It’s not really a bitch. It’s more of a way to say I can’t wait to see you.

Francesca: Oh, look, if I’m not mistaken, the Long Island Rail Road will get you to Fourth, like the sort of nexus. I think it’s at Fourth Avenue. You just get off there and take the R or the local line down Fourth, from Brooklyn Ave, I guess it is, whatever that nexus is. And then walk like five, walk like six blocks. It’s really simple.

Max: Unbelievable looking. Unbelievable.

Francesca: I lived there. I lived around The Bell House years and years ago. But I’m pretty sure the Long Island Rail Road gets you very close, is what I’m trying to say. All right.

Max: I’ll do what I can. I’ll figure it out.

Francesca: You could do it. I just don’t know how you get back. This is my—this is my—I would then, I would just like—

Max: Yeah.

Francesca: Then you just gotta fly.

Max: Yeah. Or horseback. I mean, there’s a—I got ways. I always get—you got ways.

So I want to talk to you about the midterms. Again, locked in this economic box, we’ve got some midterms coming up, and here’s how I’ll set it up, because I don’t know how the Democratic Party writ large is interpreting this now that we’re through the primary season. This is their campaign to run. Whoever’s on the ticket is on the ticket. Back when Trump was first reelected, the famous James Carville statement: we just need to sit on our hands. He’s going to fuck everything up, and we’ll be back in power in no time. Now, since then, he’s been losing his lid on a regular basis, because he can’t believe that we would be so obnoxious as to run left candidates against his precious middle-ground Democrats.

Francesca: Right.

Max: But he does have a political point, as much as I hate to say it, that I feel like the midterms are going to go overwhelmingly Democratic. And it’s becoming more and more obvious as his polling numbers slip, as the primaries sort of teased out the core issues here. What are you looking at most closely in these midterms? What is your perspective on the potential in them, but also maybe then the downside?

Francesca: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s important, when Republicans get shown their asses in November, to not take it as necessarily an endorsement writ large of the Democratic Party. American voters hate Donald Trump, but they hate the Democratic Party—actually, in some polls, more. They don’t see the Democratic Party standing for anything. They don’t think they fight hard enough, and they certainly haven’t seen leadership out of Schumer and Jeffries. Jeffries meeting with Jared Kushner, whatnot. Both of them refusing or barely endorsing Zohran Mamdani. They have not seen the leadership, I think, that they’ve wanted to see. So what I’ve been told and what I’ve been listening to is the idea that voters are just pissed. This is an angry election and electorate, and they want change, and they want to get out of this absolute economic hole, these wars that we’ve been foisted into.

So the question is, what happens next? That to me is what I am looking towards, and what I am most interested in is what happens next. And back to Jeffries: it really does matter whether or not he is in leadership, if he is speaker. Because this is someone who does not believe in things like Medicare for All. This is someone who openly chides progressives. This is someone who takes corporate PAC money. They take AIPAC money. They’re not willing to change course when it comes to Israel. Sure, he doesn’t like Netanyahu, but so does everyone. So that is the most safe position, to say “I don’t like Netanyahu.” And what’s interesting is you’ve got Israeli elections coming up in which Netanyahu might not even be prime minister, and so there’s also a worry that I have that Democrats are going to take that as sort of a phew moment, we don’t have to address just how much we have contributed to the suffering of Palestinian people at the expense of our own taxpayers, because now there’s new leadership in Israel, and it’s not this genocidal maniac, it’s another genocidal maniac, right? It’s someone who agrees with Netanyahu almost on everything.

So to me, it’s about this speakership fight. And I remember back in 2018, or was it 2020, the speakership fight over Nancy Pelosi. Now, I think Nancy Pelosi is a better leader, a better whip, than Jeffries, but I also think that her politics are the same. And I remember there was a moment of leverage that progressives had as to whether or not they were going to endorse Pelosi. Well, they might not have had the leverage then, but they certainly, with the arrival of so many more progressives, leftists, DSA candidates, they will have that leverage now going forward, and I want to see them use it. You’ve seen Claire Valdez of New York and Darializa Avila Chevalier say that they don’t know if they’re going to support Hakeem Jeffries. At this point, they say they wouldn’t.

You’ve got people like Melat Kiros in Denver. I mean, this is someone who literally ran a campaign because her law firm fired her for speaking out about Palestine, specifically saying we shouldn’t chill free speech. That is illegal under the law when it comes to other law firms, and for that stance, she herself was fired. And so this is a new class that is fired up about Israel. They’re fired up about real change for working people. And more importantly, they know that if Democrats squander whatever majority we have, we will be back in the same shit in two years, in four years, in ’28, in ’32, whatever it is, except it’ll be worse, right? And so I think that’s why there’s an urgency. That’s why there’s a surge in leftist and democratic socialist candidates, and I think we need to just make sure that the agenda is not set by centrists, by corporatists, and by former Republicans going forward.

Max: Oh gosh, hang on that former Republicans statement for a second, because I think that’s another tributary that we can float down.

Francesca: Totally.

Max: So instead of taking it from a left position—because I do hear a lot of leftists say, “what’s going to be the difference with this new class versus when we had the Squad fully charged with all the attention on them? They’re going to squander the same opportunity because they don’t have the political muscle. They’re going to get into the system and realize there’s not enough of us yet.” So I do catch wind of some of the infighting on the left, like, this is all performative bullshit, it’s never going to happen. So I was more interested in pulling the, I guess, the center left. If you could—I don’t even know what this spectrum looks like anymore. But I spoke to somebody who’s very close to the Schumer team, who’s in the Schumer team, saying “nobody’s ever going to get rid of us because we’re too easy of a foil.” It’s so much more beneficial for the left in my party to be able to say it’s fucking Chuck Schumer, because nobody really has the metal to go up against the Republican machine right now, because we don’t really have anything to stand on, we don’t stand for anything, so it’s a lot easier for us to just be like, “oh well, you know, Chuck.” And with that kind of institutional rot mindset, I wonder how disruptive this new class really could potentially be. Do you think an El-Sayed victory shakes the calculus a little bit in the Senate in the same way that maybe a Nixon does in the House? Because that’s not a blue district. I mean, we’re talking about Florida here, right? Do you think that these—

Francesca: Well, Angie Nixon’s running in the Senate. That’s for Senate.

Max: Or for Senate, right. Do you think that these candidates have the potential to be the avatars of authentic change that maybe we didn’t have the muscle for before? Are they a wake-up call?

Francesca: 100%, they’re a wake-up call. I mean, first of all, that is the most grotesque thing I have heard, but it doesn’t surprise me from the Schumer camp. I think they’re wrong, but I think that there is far too often a stratification, a pecking order, in the Democratic Party that honestly Republicans simply don’t have. You’ve got, you know, Marjorie Greene—she’s gone now, but she can come in there guns blazing and be like a brand new person, and kind of work her way to the top of the Republican Party. Be one of the biggest fundraisers. Be sort of the person who’s kind of out in front on a lot of things. And I think the Democrats have a lot more reverential, seniority-based politics, even though half of them are dying in office. But I also think many Congresspeople are retiring. A new class is coming in, no matter what their politics are. So there’s just a shift in general.

But it’s interesting that that person on the Schumer staff saying “they like us because they can just blame us.” I think that might be the case for some people, and it certainly makes you wonder: hey, why was it a Republican, Thomas Massie, that introduced articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth? Because any Congressperson could do that. What’s the holdup? Why are you waiting? Al Green, who was ousted in a campaign helped by Jasmine Crockett over there, and also cryptocurrency, sadly—Al Green was one of these representatives who was like, “let’s impeach Trump now, I’m introducing articles of impeachment now.” It’s not performative, because it says to the people that you’re willing to fight even if you know it’s not going to happen or not going to pass. At least you fought, at least you brought up the conversation. Sure, you’re not going to necessarily have the votes to impeach Pete Hegseth, but what Massie got to do was lay out a list of the crimes that he has committed while in this seat. And so that, to me, is—I mean, that’s another thing we have to talk about—is, like, day two or day whatever, it’s about actually holding these lawless crooks accountable. Whether it’s for the white collar crimes, for the war crimes, for whatever it is that they’re doing, for the ICE insanity and the trampling of human rights, the abuses. This shit has got to stop.

Max: What does that look like when you’re still facing the veto? What is enough? What is the next move that kind of announces that the Democrats will not just be ready to be a bulwark against the Trump administration finishing its project for the remainder of this term, but setting the stage for them to be like, you are going to get more of this, motherfuckers, if we take 2028? Like, what are the things that you think they could do out of the gate?

Francesca: After 2028, or before? So—

Max: In this next congressional term. What are those things that they could do to kind of signal to the American people, we’re not letting him do any more of his bullshit? And also, look, we’re finally game-time ready. We got a plan. What are those seeds that they can plant now, do you think?

Francesca: I think it’s got to be two-pronged. One is stopping the bleeding on this fascism and this fascist administration. So it could look like impeaching Trump, but I think more specifically, it should be stopping Pete Hegseth. To me, he’s one of the biggest—honestly, the biggest liability. He’s getting people killed. The other person that’s getting people killed, and I think could also be impeached, is someone like RFK Jr., someone like Mehmet Oz. Right, these people who have our health in their hands and who are fumbling the ball, who are relying on complete non-science mumbo jumbo and getting children killed. Period. So to me, those three figures kind of bubble up to the surface.

Then there’s the cronyism. There is the white collar crime, the enrichment from the office. And you look at Howard Lutnick, you look at Donald Trump himself, you look at the family members. So they have to be, if nothing else, right, called before hearings. There has to be investigations into them. Of course, Trump is going to call it a witch hunt, and you have to have a line back. It has to couple with a narrative.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. As soon as you start, whether it’s long hearings or whatnot, the right is going to say witch hunt. The right is going to say political witch hunt, political retribution, and we are going to have to remind them that they have gone after unarmed activists who say free Palestine, unarmed activists who had the audacity to stand up for their undocumented neighbors, like Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, who were murdered, to say nothing of the almost 70 people who’ve died in ICE detention or at the hands of ICE officers. These are innocent people. So you talk about political retribution; they’re doing racial retribution. We have to remember all of the ways. Even Lindsey Graham’s home—before they had the war in Iran to bro out about, Donald Trump issued a search of his home. There’s endless shit. The NSPM-7, the criminalizing of people with different beliefs than the correct beliefs, anti-Americanism, all of this. We have to make sure that when they say witch hunt, we can be like, “oh no, no, no, no, buddy. We are simply trying to enact laws and make good by the laws of our Constitution that you all have violated, like things like the Hatch Act, things like enriching yourself from the office of the president.”

So whatever it is, because we’re in narrative territory, it has to be matched with the narrative. So anyone going on mainstream news, and Democratic operatives themselves, and consultants, some of them, who have no fucking idea how to do this, because all they do when they get accused of something is go, like, “okay, you’re kind of right, but, like.” So that to me is, like, really, really important.

And I think the second prong is, what are we doing for the people? Look, look at Zohran, filling the potholes, rolling out universal pre-K, freezing the rent. He did it. I mean, I think we’re waiting on free buses, but he’s doing it. So what are we doing concretely for the people? There has to be a moratorium on data centers. I think that does a lot for the people who are deeply concerned about that. I know that’s stopping something, but yes, I think we need to see things—if it isn’t the restoration, or finding the funds, if it’s beefing up the IRS in order to shore up SNAP, shore up Medicaid, that’s in the immediate. Obviously, universal health care is the goal in short order, but you have to make people whole right now. And I mean, I don’t fucking know how it works. I’m not the expert here, but the Trump tax cuts need to be overturned. We need to get rid of them.

We cannot afford as a nation to keep on offering the richest of Americans these tax breaks. It’s absolutely fucking wild. So, the thing I’ll say about Angie Nixon, and I don’t know if she’s gonna win. I did donate personally, because it’s someone who I’m like, she’s being hung out to dry by Chuck Schumer and the like. But this is a working mom. She’s so good. And just, like, her being able to speak to what government can do for you and what it should do for you, Zohran Mamdani. He has the right talk, but because he’s kind of an upper middle class guy, he didn’t really necessarily experience that. And we’re always taught to feel shame whenever you rely on welfare or food stamps, or to say, well, “I did it, but now no one else can have it,” right? We know the biggest recipients of welfare are white women, right? But of course, we think of them as Black women. And so I don’t know. I just think we need more of that energy. The Democrats need to fucking listen to working people and poor people.

Max: I’m glad you mentioned narrative, because I wanna get your thoughts on what we’re supposed to be doing with now the center of the spectrum, specifically the Log Cabin Republicans, the Lincoln Republicans, The Bulwark Republicans, those types of people. Because we talk about narratives a lot, in that we’re not writing model legislation, we’re not part of think tanks. We are actually in the narrative, in the punditry culture. But in that narrative sense, right now, what should we be doing, in your opinion, with that center right that has, in many ways, they’ve kind of co-opted the liberal narrative by being the Never Trumpers—

Francesca: Yes.

Max: —but I see again on the left, there’s a spectrum of outreach. It’s like, all right, I’ll fuck with The Bulwark people, but I’m not going to fuck with the Lincoln Project. Or fuck all of them, we never want to participate. All the way down the line to, “I want to be on Tucker Carlson’s show, because this is how we do proper outreach to the right, and we can win them over.” Our philosophy has always been: if you’re anywhere to the right, fuck them, because we need to get our house in order over here, and we haven’t built a tentpole narrative that’s big enough to bring people who are naturally inclined toward social public policies that benefit all. So we got to get that together. Like, enough with the outreach, because in my mind, the outreach to that side also allows them to, in a reverse order, co-opt the narrative discussions that we should be having. So where do you sit on that right now?

Francesca: These people have to be irrelevant going forward. They have to be less and less relevant, and it’s very hard for them, because they’re used to having a front seat. They’re used to being consultants. They’re used to advising the Kamala Harris campaign to pivot to the center. They’re used to pretending like they have some sort of finger on the pulse of middle America, when they do not, and they’ve been proven that they do not. And so I look at the quality of candidates that have won these primaries on the Democratic side, and don’t get me started if Abdul El-Sayed loses. Because to me, if he loses, that is squarely on this manufactured outrage around Hasan Piker and everyone who participated in it, from The Bulwark to Fox.

Max: Are you telling me that Hasan Piker is not on the ballot? That’s not what you’re suggesting, because isn’t he occupying every ballot across all 50 states?

Francesca: I’m pretty sure it’s a vote for Hasan Piker, which is a vote for wanting another 9/11. That’s when you vote for anybody who Hasan Piker supported. So that to me is the real thing. They need to be irrelevant, but they have a lot of money, because they are conservatives, and conservatives have money. And I hate to toot our own horn, but I do think it’s tough, because we actually need better independent left voices, more folks like yourself, me, Wajahat Ali, who I love and whose analysis I think is spot on. We represent people who had a toe in the mainstream news world, but because let’s say Bernie Sanders didn’t win the elections, because Donald Trump came back, because there was COVID, for whatever reason, because we are unsafe for mainstream news, we are now kind of out in the wilderness. Joy Ann Reid is another person, Don Lemon to a different extent. A lot of people have gone independent. I think Joy has incredible analysis, and I think she’s right on the money. So it’s like, how can we support those people’s platforms getting bigger and bigger, and having conversations with one another and creating our own Bulwark, our own nexus, against these former Republicans?

Because let’s be real, the narrative I just mentioned about welfare queens being Black, even though we know that disproportionately white people are on welfare, that is a right-wing narrative that has been manufactured for decades. That people like the folks on The Bulwark participated in. All this idea of entitlement programs. That you should want smaller government. That fuck government, that what’s even the point of government. This is the natural conclusion of everything they have sown. So, sorry you don’t like reaping what you just sowed, but we all saw the seeds that you were planting. It sucks that you bore, like, a shit tree over here, but fucking—that’s what your narrative is.

And so, again, it’s just the money, because I think about it, I’m like, how are these fools, like, still out here with this huge following? And it is money. So how can we move our money into people that we believe in? And that could even be like a Substack journalist who is not safe for mainstream news, but who we believe in and whose work we want to support. I’ve been in media for a very long time, and so nonprofit foundation funding never goes into media. Never goes into media. Why? It’s very difficult to prove to foundations what the outcome is, what the growth is. A lot of foundations supported by rich people, well-intentioned rich people. But those well-intentioned rich people generally, when they give to the left or progressives, they want to give to, like, hunger or poverty or prison stuff, stuff that’s very real, but it has nothing to do with creating these narratives. The right is very smart about having their Turning Point USA. It’s very easy to get in line with fascism, because it literally requires a line to do it. But they are so much better at that, and the left is not, and it also has to do with the hangups around nonprofit funding broadly.

Max: It’s interesting that there’s—I didn’t think there was a fracture on the right necessarily. Like, the expats of the Bush years, these Bulwark people, or, you know, anybody that sort of sits in—

Francesca: The Biden people were expats of the Bush years.

Max: [Laughing] The Biden people, right.

Taking those people out of the mix, when we look at the consensus that’s built on, you know, the right, at least the governing right that we have today, what I consider the Russell Vought wing of the party that is just falling in lockstep. I thought that there was more unanimity on that side, and then went to the book launch for American Caesar by Brad Onishi from Straight White American Jesus. Do you follow that podcast?

Francesca: Oh, no!

Max: Oh, you got to get hooked on it. It’s so good. It’s two former evangelicals that came up in the evangelical strain that now do political reporting from the other side, basically being like, this is what it was like to be indoctrinated. It’s a phenomenal show. So he just came out with this book, American Caesar, and he’s talking about the splinter on the right that’s coming, in that you have this sort of technofeudal, Peter Thiel-style side of the party that believes in the Antichrist, literally, right, and then you’ve got the evangelical Doug Wilson strain that emerged into the Russell Voughts and the JD Vances of the world. You still have the neocon wing that’s just like, fuck it, I just want to go to war, however we get in there. They’re aligned on taking power. They’re not necessarily aligned on what the goals are, because the technocrats, they just want islands with bunkers and all of the money and the resources left.

Francesca: Yeah.

Max: They see the Republican Party as the pathway to get that. The evangelical strain is looking toward the end times. They’re cheering them on. They’re inviting them. Like JD Vance said, like, “if I bring it about, pretty great stuff, huh? I did it.” And then you’ve just got the neocons that are like, “yeah, this is a resource war, we just fucking want to bomb everybody.” That fracture there, in that they’re not aligned on the end game now that they won’t have their useful idiot in Trump, to me tells me there’s a political opening there, again on the left, if we build the right narratives. In your mind, what are the tentpole narratives that we should be hammering as part of the narrative media here? As you mentioned, our job is just to shape the ideas and the issues, put it out to you, because you’re too busy to do this stuff, so we’ll think about it for you and present it to you. What should we all be talking about?

Francesca: I come back to James Talarico’s candidacy and his campaign, because I know that I am so much more to the left than that man, but he’s been saying two things really well on my show. I just had Chuck Rocha, who’s a strategist who’s working with Talarico. And I don’t know if I would say it exactly like this, but specifically in terms of the economy, we have to say it is the 99% versus the 1%. We need to stop looking left or right. We need to look up. And Talarico says, look up, “look up at the billionaire class.” I think the advent of the Epstein class is a very important turn of phrase that we need to be capitalizing on and continuing to speak on. So that to me is really vital.

And in tandem with that is something else that Talarico talks about, which is we want a welcome mat at our border, we don’t want, like, walls and chains and whatnot. We want a legal process for immigration, but we also want to welcome mat, something to this effect. Because I think that in order to not get distracted at looking at blaming one another, and realizing that we’re in solidarity against the 1%, we have to have a human-centered vision of immigration. There has to be a complete overhaul in how we talk about immigration that centers people. These are people. Every person deserves to be treated with dignity. Every person simply does what they can to survive. These are our neighbors. These are our friends. These are our family. We need to have far more empathy. And I don’t give a fuck, man. Lean into the Jesus shit. Talarico does. Be Christian about it. Welcome thy stranger, because at least it’s a human-centric model. We have to reclaim the morality of this country, to be fair, honestly. That to me is how we narratively get out of the sunken place of xenophobia, racism, and billionaire mindset that we’re all suddenly going to get rich and this immigrant is preventing me from doing so.

Max: Yeah, I should pay more attention to Talarico. I don’t know, a few times over the summer, I was like, I’m not doing it. My heart is too fragile right now. I’ve got other things I’m thinking about. I’m not going to be Lucy with the fucking football in Texas again. It’s never going blue. I’m ignoring it. But maybe, maybe I should pay attention.

Francesca: One good thing. I haven’t seen a lot of Talarico in the news, and I actually kind of take that as a good thing, because it tells me two things. Number one, there’s no national media narrative being formed against him the way that there is Abdul El-Sayed, which I think has a lot to do with Islamophobia and Hasan Piker. What?

Max: What? That’s so—stop.

Francesca: And number two, it says that they’re focused on Texas, and that’s where you have to be focused on, because that’s what you want to win. And so I think there is something heartening about not hearing too much of it, knowing that there’s a ground game, there’s work being done. And I think anything’s fucking possible.

Max: [Sarcastically] Not for nothing, but that man El-Sayed has a very scary name. It’s unusual. It’s just—it’s not white. I don’t know if you know that, Frani.

Francesca: There are people who say that verbatim, that they could not vote for someone named El-Sayed. And what’s so insidious about the Hasan Piker insistence is that everyone who’s peddling it is blatantly ignoring the Islamophobia that both El-Sayed and Hasan Piker are dealing with, and actually what they’re—

Max: It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? They can’t hear it.

Francesca: —and what they’re trafficking in, too. And I’m sorry, but, like, this is the same party that likes to use identity politics to their benefit, that any slight against Hakeem Jeffries that could be interpreted as racist is racist, and how dare you, and oh my God. And you’re like, you only whip out the identity politics and the anti-racism for candidates that you care about, and certainly you don’t have any Muslim candidates. The last acceptable bigotry, Islamophobia in this country. The Democratic Party hasn’t had shit to say about that in 25 fucking years. I am so tired. And I think young people, after seeing, I don’t know, dead Palestinians over and over again, are like, “huh, it’s almost like our political class doesn’t value, you know, Muslim life, doesn’t value Palestinian life. Gee.” It’s not lost on young folks, man. It’s super obvious. This is the BLM generation. These are folks who understand what racism in action looks like.

Max: I think maybe you’re minimizing, and I don’t want to be critical, but you might be minimizing the struggles that white guys are going through. And I can speak to it myself. You know, what’s happened to John Fetterman, obviously the tragedy that happened to Graham Platner, holding these guys to account. It hasn’t been easy for us, Francesca.

Francesca: We need to understand.

Max: If you could hold that space for us, that would be amazing. Thank you.

Francesca: So held.

Max: One last thing. You’ve given me a lot of your time, and I appreciate it.

Francesca: No, it’s great talking with you.

Max: And I do hope that we can do this again and have a postmortem after the midterms, because I would love to get your thoughts on how that all shaped up. Before we go, you started your bitch about California, and I’m just curious your sentiments about the Ellison deal that is going through now with Skydance. One of the things that I just read—I think it was in Bloomberg, because they were talking about the debt structure for this company. Outside of the debt structure for Oracle, they’re talking about the specific layers of debt that they put together to solidify this deal. There is now a new tranche of top-tier debt that is above the junk subordinated debt that they have, and it is enormous. And it was a very healthy auction. There was a lot of demand for that new debt. But part of the classification for it is that they can take on however much debt they want. They can also use proceeds to do stock buybacks. And they’re promising to the bondholders that they’re going to cut a minimum of $6 billion in overhead with the merger. And so right away my head was like, okay, so there’s only one way to get that level of cost cutting right out of the gate, and that’s obviously people. So as a Californian who has—you have been doing this a very long time. You’ve been in media. You’re obviously an entertainer as well. You have friends who are writers and producers who are also very much in the business. Do you have a sense of the broader concern in an industry that’s so important to California as to what this merger really means?

Francesca: I mean, it’s the death knell for California. And what’s so painful and ironic is that Gavin Newsom, Rob Bonta, attorney general here, incoming Governor Xavier Becerra most likely, they all pulled for the merger, because they believe the threat that the Ellisons were going to move Hollywood out of L.A. Well, spoiler number one: Hollywood’s already being moved out of L.A. And number two, they’re going to move it out of L.A. eventually anyway. They’re not going to keep it. And so what’s so sick is, I don’t think we’re done handing the Ellisons fucking cash. It’s not only that they got this massive merger, but they’re going to keep wielding it, because if you threaten once and you got what you wanted, you’re going to keep threatening. Which is, “no, we’re going to need more tax breaks from the American tax—the Californian taxpayer. We’re going to need more handouts. We’re going to need more space. We’re going to need more.” And Democrats are going to say, “all right, how high?” Right? That is it. And at what cost?

And it is. I mean, working writers, working film editors, working actors, people in services, catering, costuming, anything like that. These are jobs where you could sustain a family. These are jobs where one day maybe you could have even afforded a home. That’s gone. It is bottoming out. People are leaving the industry. They’re choosing to do other things. Their dreams are dying on the vine. For people like myself who’ve pitched stories, pitched shows, never got them greenlit. I mean, it was tough back in 2021. Now it’s even worse. And certainly, if you are doing anything truly creative, meaning original—I don’t care if it’s politically original, if it’s narratively, creatively original—we are not in a time of originality. Years ago you’d hear, okay, well, what’s the IP? Everyone’s already obsessed with IP. Now it’s even gonna get worse with where’s the IP, and we’re gonna fucking bring back every goddamn cartoon from the ’80s and make, like, a live action Care Bears, which is gonna be weird. But only AI. Like, you know, who knows?

It’s so—it’s bad. And there is something, like, weirdly exciting about whatever is gonna rise in the ashes. Do you know what I mean? Like, culture finds a way. And so I’ve talked to my, you know, actor friends who are like, “you know, I’m just making my own movie. I’m making my own film. I’m doing a short. We’re doing this because I wanted to do it.” And, like, granted, that’s money that they have to find, but there’s also something beautiful about recognizing that the behemoth is bullshit, that the industry is dying, but still the relentless commitment to creativity, to fun, to new stories, to new writing. I think that’s gonna keep happening. At least that’s what my most optimistic friends are saying. But in the medium to short term, it’s a fucking death knell.

Max: Yeah. Okay.

Francesca: What is it? A death rattle. It’s bad.

Max: Okay. That’s kind of what I anticipated. Again, I’ve been following it in my periphery only because of the debt connection to Oracle and how much that they have personally guaranteed. I can tell you this much, from even just a cursory analysis of it: the math does not math when you put Oracle, how much debt they’ve personally put on themselves, and then the debt that’s required to put this together. This whole thing is a house of cards. So the bigger concern to me is that Oracle brings down the AI bubble.

Francesca: Yep.

Max: It has enough in it to do it on its own. But if that happens, I don’t think necessarily we’re putting two and two together, the bloodletting that would be required at Skydance because of the cross-pollination of all the debt that’s tied to the family. So the worst case scenario is that it operates fine and they go according to how they’ve laid it out, which is to cut a massive amount of staff. But the worst case scenario is that they actually wind up obliterating the company because they were so reckless with debt.

Francesca: I mean, this is the thing about the Biden administration that was good, right? It was the antitrust. It was the Lina Khan of it all, right? This merger is illegal. Look at it. You can see it’s illegal. It is a monopoly. And I just—

Max: Thank you, Mark Ruffalo.

Francesca: Yes, fuck man.

Max: He should be available for hire anytime soon, because I don’t think anybody’s gonna touch him. Good lord.

Francesca: I think they’re still gonna touch him. The problem is, ironically, for a town that has unions, there’s a massive wedge being driven between directors and actors, actors and actors. You got people like Tom Cruise coming out in favor of the merger, and even Spike Lee, directors coming out in front of the merger. DGA is, like, living high on the hog, whereas, like, WGA obviously is, like, incensed and upset. But, like, the strike was a rough time, and I think what emerged from it was not necessarily better, because it’s almost like it was too late. Doing a strike like that was too late down this enshittified Hollywood, this completely dominated by mergers. So I just, I’m trying to make sense of it as well, to be like, where can we find that worker power going forward in this industry? Because it’s gonna take the worker power. It’s gonna take strikes. They can’t fire everybody if you’re on strike, do you know what I’m saying? Like, I mean, in some ways, they just can’t. So I’m not in either of these unions. I’m not in a union here in the industry. But that’s sort of my, like, outsider little, like, “fight harder, blah.”

So I don’t know, dog. The other thing is, like, can we put this cat back in the bag? I mean, it’s all wrapped up in tech, too. Amazon should be nationalized. Period. The company should be nationalized. It is that big. It is that important. Let’s take it over. We’ll give him a fucking buyout, and you can go on your merry goddamn way, Bezos. But this is a national thing, because it’s a national marketplace. It’s an international marketplace. Like, there’s ideas like that that have to be more than just, let’s sue Google over their ads, which is important, and it’s a step. But it’s like, I’m waiting for real big fucking ideas to come along.

Max: Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I’ll leave you with a compliment that I think I gave you once before, but I want to reiterate it here, which is, I don’t know how you keep the pace that you keep. I actually can’t do the math on how much content, and quality content, you create. But when you take a breath and commit to writing your long form stuff, I think your long form stuff is as good as anything out there on the internet, in the culture. Period. End of story. The way your mind works, the way you write, and then the way you put it out there is amazing. So—

Francesca: That means the world, because I foresee a little moment where I’m going to put pause on that, because it’s rough, you know. And people don’t always have the taste that you have, Max. The taste!

Max: Well, it’s hard. It’s extremely time-consuming. And to be a self-editor is really, really difficult as well, when you don’t have a room to bounce it off of, and you got to be self-critical. But I do think when you commit to it, your stuff is just outstanding. And you’re just a great voice. I love seeing—I mean, you’ve been in Al Jazeera, Zeteo, Majority Report. You’re fairly ubiquitous on the left, but you’re so morally consistent that it’s nice to see that you are the Visa card, and all that. You’re accepted in all of these places, because I think you’re a great throughline for the left.

Francesca: Yeah, why doesn’t one of them want to hire me full time? I’m just kidding.

Max: Too good, too expensive.

Francesca: I can’t. It’s, you know, I just, I’m just perennially broke. I’m not broke, but I’m, like, not—you know, shit is tough right now. It’s, like, so brutal. The math does not math. The math ain’t mathing anywhere. But anyway, come see me live, because, you know, it’s cheaper than—I was looking at tickets. I was like, oh, let me go see the Gorillaz. $400 to see the Gorillaz. I can’t. Like, I’m not—I cannot do that. I love the Gorillaz. I would dance my ass off. I’m gonna tap out on a Gorillaz show at, like, $150. My show is $30, $32, I think, with tax. So come see me. Very affordable, and we can dance to the Gorillaz afterwards.

Max: That works for me, Francesca. I will be there, out of my little suburban comfort zone, down in the big city of Brooklyn.

Francesca: Oh no! Look out!

Max: And I can’t wait to see you. And I really, really appreciate this time, more than you know. And hopefully we could do it again after the midterms, and we’ll be celebrating something. I don’t know what exactly, but we’ll be celebrating something.

Francesca: We’ll be celebrating either way.

Max: Francesca Fiorentini, The Bitchuation Room. Fucking tune in, everybody. That’s an order.