A rant, Christopher Sweat

I was on the ground covering the TeslaTakedown protest in Chicago. Later this week, we will release footage from 13 other cities. This video focuses on Chicago. In fact, you’ll see I got into it with protestors after a group was harassing Chicago PD for about 15 minutes.

This movement was primarily catalyzed by shareholders’ activism. Elon Musk has been neglecting his role as the CEO of Tesla, a publicly traded company, and activist investors will target the public companies where they feel the management is not operating in the best interests of its shareholders. Elon Musk has been primarily focused on his role within DOGE, which has created headwinds for Tesla. Shareholder activists took the perception in civil society, weaponized it, and effectively created an emergency for Tesla management. Now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is looking to deemphasize his role in DOGE as his companies face the turmoil created by his political activities.

You’ll see signs calling him a fascist, demanding his deportation, and criticizing his government involvement and wealth.

These protests culminated in weeks of targeting Tesla dealerships around the country. Individuals and small groups defaced Tesla cars, lit them on fire, threw paint on the dealerships, held small protests on the lots, and directly targeted Tesla charging stations and car owners.

I’ll provide more analysis this week but this is just a taste and you may find some of the drama interesting.

A note on the video… I wanted to run it raw. No editing is needed. You can see the protest footage up close and personal. There’s no need for me to twist it like the mainstream media does.

A rant, Christopher Sweat is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Now, in the video Jinan Chehade speaks mid-March on Michigan Avenue and E Wacker Dr. during the protest on Saturday, March 22nd.

Chehade says, "We know this was never a true ceasefire, even before the bombing started on Tuesday."

She discusses her views on liberation, escalation, and the severity of the situation in Gaza.

This March contrasts with the end of the ceasefire in Gaza, where Israel resumed its war against Hamas on March 18 with aerial bombings followed by ground incursions in northern Gaza and the seizure of the Netzarim corridor bisecting the enclave. (Oxford Analytica Daily Brief, 21 March 2025) The analyst community acknowledges that Israel has relative freedom of action in the region of Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. Still, the domestic political environment in Israel is unstable and has been unable to conclude a political solution.

Hugh Lovatt, Senior Policy Fellow and European Council on Foreign Relations argued that Netanyahu's government is taking an illiberal turn at home. Lovatt writes the Israeli government's inability and unwillingness to set out a realistic vision is being exacerbated by a significant mismatch of Israeli expectations and tensions between the Israeli government and military leadership.

There is a growing consensus in the international community that the Israel-Gaza conflict is Netanyahu's war, as he has intertwined his personal survival with the nation's survival, preferring a prolonged and drawn-out conflict in Gaza as a way to extend his rule over Israel.

So long as the Likud party has a majority in the Knesset, incentives to coordinate with the PLA and Hamas in peace talks are limited.

Steve Witkoff, who leads the United States Special Envoy to the Middle East, spoke to Tucker Carlson last week and mentioned the importance of getting everyone to the table. Qatari partners have been the main diplomatic lever for coordination between Israel, Hamas, and the PLA, but there are commitment problems and coordination challenges in how things currently sit.

In the meantime, at least 50,021 Palestinians have been killed and 113,274 wounded since Israel began attacking the territory in response to an attack led by Hamas on 10/7/2023.

In this episode, I host Lee Edwards, a General Partner at Root Ventures in San Francisco. We discuss the political scene in San Francisco, the impact of AI on labor, Tesla, Waymo, the education system, and how we have traditionally adapted to disruptive technology. Lee invests in engineers who are starting companies that tackle the hard problems in software, such as developer tools and services, software infrastructure, applied AI and ML, and Computer Vision. In recent years, Lee has been a CTO at Teespring, a mechanical engineer at iRobot, a software engineer at Pivotal Labs, a Lead Engineer at SideTour (acquired by Groupon in 2013), and an engineering manager for GrouponLive. He graduated from Olin College of Engineering with a degree in Systems Engineering.

Connect with Lee - X/Twitter: terronk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leeredwards/ Root Ventures: https://root.vc/

Avantika Mehra joined me to talk about her unique perspective on the future of technology. Avantika is an emerging leader, a technologist, and an interdisciplinary thinker. I think you will see this conversation as fun and an exercise in creative thinking. Avantika had originally inspired some of my thinking on the future of advanced economies, which included my thoughts on computers, the labor market, and the general societal impact technology will have. Avantika plays around with interesting frameworks and theories and applies them to industry with many existing practical technologies. She has a good sense of what is ahead. She spent her early career in consulting and technology startups and now spends her time in spatial computing (you may know this as AR/VR, though it is far more encompassing of multiple computing techniques.)

Avantika also has a substack, which you can find here.

And follow her on Twitter for more!

https://twitter.com/avaa411

I host Dr. Kaleb Demerew to speak again, this time about a highly relevant topic, Red Sea Rivalries which he published here - https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/red-sea-rivalries/

This is a fascinating discussion that talks about the social, political, and maritime history of the Red Sea region, including European and Middle Eastern influence on the waterway.

We discuss the Houthis in Yemen, Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE, Turkey, Iran, Israel, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and many other powers who have influenced the region.

You can find more on Dr. Kaleb Demerew here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaldemerew/

Enjoy!

It was awesome to host Pyotr for a nuanced and informative discussion on the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict. We dug deep into domestic U.S. politics, Russia foreign policy, Ukraine foreign policy, political polarization and more.

I hope you enjoy it!

You can find more from Pyort here:

https://twitter.com/PKurzin

https://www.youtube.com/@theglobalgambit/videos

I hosted Mark Blyth, Brown University, and Sven Steinmo, University of Colorado Boulder (you remember Sven from his piece, Trump is not the Problem) to discuss their perspectives on austerity, democracy, dictators, protest, populism, knowledge economy, technology, advanced economies, and more! We dug deep into political dynamics in France, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, the United States, Israel, China, Italy, Turkey, etc. My friends in high finance will enjoy Mark Blyth's analysis!

Mark Blyth, is The William R. Rhodes ‘57 Professor of International Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He is someone who may have heard through his collaboration with Nicholas Nasim Taleb in their piece, The Black Swan of Cairo: How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous. Or maybe in one of Mark’s many books like Great Transformations, Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Angrynomics, The Future of the Euro, and more. His research focuses on how uncertainty and randomness impact complex systems, particularly economic systems, and why people continue to believe stupid economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary.

Find Mark Blyth on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MkBlyth

and Sven Steinmo on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/SvenSteinmo

Thanks to Sven Steinmo for putting this together!

Watch the video version on YouTube here:

And look back at Sven Steinmo’s piece, Trump is not the Problem or his introduction to our platform.

Written by Sven Steinmo

There is a lot of hand-wringing today about Donald Trump's potential to get elected as the next president of the United States (again). It's not only that people dislike his grandiose and narcissistic personality. Nor is it even that they fear that he will be on the ballot in November. The real fear these days is that he will undermine our hallowed Constitution. After all this narrative holds, the Constitution has made our country great, and we have the most democratic constitution in the world.

Ironically, the MAGA supporters of Donald Trump have a remarkably similar argument. But in their case, they think that our Constitution has already been undermined by the elites that run our political system. They believe the US Constitution was a profoundly democratic institution hampered by the “political elite.”

They are both wrong. The US Constitution was never a particularly democratic document. In fact, the US Constitution was constructed precisely because the elite in America in the latter part of the 18th century were terrified of democracy. The much beloved “checks and balances” were established precisely because America's elite believed that the democratic impulses unleashed by the Revolutionary War had gotten out of hand. Ask yourself, what is being checked in a system? Why is power divided power so profoundly in the American political system? The answer was, as Madison claimed, the “passions and the interests” of the uneducated masses needed to be checked.

“The essential truth," Richard Henry Lee observed, was that the Constitution was "a transfer of power from the many to the few."[i]  Or as historian Gordon Wood put it: “All of what the Federalists wanted out of the new central government seemed in the final analysis dependent upon the pre-requisite maintenance of aristocratic politics.”[ii]

In a very real sense, the Declaration of Independence motivated many average Americans to participate in the Revolutionary War. It should not be surprising that after the war, they thought that “all men are created equal” and that there should be no taxation without representation. They were most certainly not fighting for an elite-based political system that would leave out the vast majority of small property holders (not to speak of those without property).

And so, a small group of wealthy men (the majority of which were slaveholders, by the way) Designed a political system that would “pit faction against faction.” This was not a political system designed to make it easy to pass laws unless the elite had already agreed to them. It was instead a set of political institutions specifically and explicitly designed to ensure it would not be responsive to the majority's will.

James Otis, a prominent lawyer and Revolutionary leader, was blunt:.  "When the pot boils, the scum will rise to the top."   Gouverneur Morris, who was called the "Penman of the Constitution" and wrote its' preamble, was equally skeptical of the common man. Considering the Shays Rebellion, he complained, "[t]he mob begin to think and reason.  Poor reptiles!... they bask in the sun, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it.  The gentry begin to fear this."[iii]

The system checked power over domestic affairs, but America needed strong authority in foreign affairs.  Which at that time meant conquering a rich and profoundly fertile continent. So, our political system gave power to the President over foreign policy... (but let’s not forget that the President was not then, and is still not today, elected by average citizens.)

And in many ways, it worked. What became the United States of America, with its small population of only 3 million whites, came to dominate and control the richest piece of real estate on the planet. Literally, millions of Native Americans were killed, starved, and relocated so that the European settlers who flocked to this nation could take advantage of this bounty. After all, what did you need a government for other than ethnically cleansing the lands so that the Europeans could take advantage of them.?

As we entered the 20th century, however, people started to demand more of their government than simply clearing the lands. At first, that meant funding railroads, etcetera, so more people could get out West. But soon, cities became more complex, dirty, and even dangerous. And as factories started to develop in America, average citizens demanded that their government do something to protect them from America's capitalist elite and their policies.

The Progressive Era was the first move in this direction. But here, the fragmentation of American institutions, which allows small and powerful interests to fund elections, was used to the advantage of that very elite. The regulations passed in the Progressive Era of very became hostage to the very interest they were supposed to regulate.

As we all know, that didn't work very well. Then came the Great Depression.

With the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Americans demanded that the government act in their common interest and not just the interest of the rich and powerful. It's hard to overstate his popularity and the New Deal agenda. Roosevelt was elected four times with massive majorities. In many ways, America was on its way to developing something like a majoritarian democracy despite the institutional checks on the will of the people.

It did not last all that long. At first, the Dow family, the Henry Luce family, the Hearsts,  etcetera, etcetera were pushed back on their heels. And, of course, World War 2 intervened. The war was another period of a sense of common interest and common purpose. In the process, Americans united around an identity they thought would be democratic and more egalitarian. But by the end of World War 2 and with the death of FDR, the campaign against American democracy came into force.

The sophisticated use of propaganda campaigns, both on television, which was now in almost everyone's home by the mid-50s, and the manipulation of religious leaders - especially in the South - began to undermine people's faith in their government. Equally importantly, government authority was increasingly used to benefit particular groups and interests over others. President Truman tried to build on FDR's legacy by bringing in a National Health insurance plan, but it was systematically undermined even though over 60% of Americans wished for such a plan at the time. (Note that over 60% of Americans have consistently believed that no one should go without health care because they can't afford it or that people should be driven into poverty because their child gets sick.) But that is just one example. There are dozens of others, from gun rights to agricultural price supports to building modern infrastructure.

I will not detail here what would be a very long list of failures of American politics and public policy. It doesn't matter whether you're on the left or the right; I’m sure you have your own list of how our politicians have failed us. But the problem is not “our politicians.” The problem is the constitutional checks on the publics’ will.

And so now we have Donald Trump. What is his basic claim? It is that our political system is run by an elite who doesn't trust average Americans. Bizarrely, though, when they storm the capital to try and bring down the political system, they claim to be defending the Constitution.  They would be quite surprised (and no doubt very angry) to learn that this elitism was fundamental to the basic design of our system.

Donald Trump has recently inferred that he would undermine the Constitution and become a dictator on day one. That is very unlikely, given how ensconced the checks and balances are. I don't mean to suggest that he won’t damage American politics or society. I'm certain he will.

My point is more basic: Donald Trump is so popular today because he has something right. Our political system is both anti-democratic and doesn't work very well.

No wonder so many Americans don’t trust our government.

[i] Cited in Countryman, 1987:559. Countryman 1985

[ii] Wood 1969p. 492.

[iii] Cited in Hofstadter 1973p. 7.

You can play the recording here or watch our conversation on YouTube!

Dr. Kaleb Demerew is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice at West Texas A&M. I saw his paper, Can Institutions Explain Mass Violence? Amhara ‘Settler’ Discourse and Ethnic Federalism in Ethiopia, and I reached out immediately to host him as our recent conversations have focused on institutions and national identity. Dr. Demerew breaks down Ethiopia's political, economic, and cultural environment and discusses his research method and conclusions on drivers of mass violence in Ethiopian society.

Find Dr. Kaleb Demerew here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaldemerew/

Find the paper we discussed here: https://lnkd.in/eHPBRrdC

Find this episode on your favorite podcast app:

Dr. Sven Steinmo joins me to discuss his background and to expand on why he thinks evolutionary theory has viable application in politics, as well as creating an entire sub-category of political science known as historical institutionalism. Dr. Steinmo will be an ongoing contributor to the platform as we inch closer and closer to the coming election. We will be hosting him and his peers for many debates, and they come from disciplines like political economy, political science, sociology, and more.

Here is the YouTube Link to our talk if you prefer to watch it there!

Dr. Steinmo has received many awards.

My Ph.D. thesis, titled “The Mobilization of Bias,” won the American Political Science Association Gabriel Almond Award for best Ph.D. thesis in comparative politics. 1989

His first book, “Taxation and Democracy,” won the American Political Science Association “William Riker Award” for best book in political economy. 1994

Another book he authored, “The Evolution of the Modern State,” won the Gunnar Myrdal Award for the best book on evolutionary political economy by the European Association of Evolutionary Theory. 2011

Dr. Steinmo is a German Marshall Fellow and has won a wide number of international fellowships, including the European Research Council’s “Advanced Researcher Frontier Grant” for over 2.25 million euros.

Dr. Steinmo has also been a visiting professor at the University of Oxford, the University of Tokyo, The Max Plank Institute, the University of Gothenburg, The European University Institute, The Copenhagen Business School, and the Schuman Center for Advanced Research, among other places.

Selected Books:

* Willing to Pay? A Reasonable Choice Approach (with John D’Attoma) Oxford University Press, (2022).

* Leap of Faith Oxford University Press (2018)

* The Evolution of Modern States: Sweden, Japan, and the United States Cambridge University Press, (2010)

* Growing Apart? America and Europe in the 21st Century Cambridge University Press, (2007)

* Restructuring the Welfare State: Political Institutions and Policy Change (2002, co-edited with Bo Rothstein)

* Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State (1996)

* Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (1992)

You can also find more information on Dr. Steinmo here:

https://www.svensteinmo.com/

https://twitter.com/SvenSteinmo

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XmKC_-8AAAAJ&hl=en