Bang-Bang Podcast

This is where the liberal resistance people were always right.

The US is an insane nuclear power. How do you revolt against that?

If change is going to come, it’s going to come from the periphery of the world-system, not the American core.

The majority of the people in the military…do not actually want a civil war.

There’s two ways that this gets resolved. There’s going to be a clash of forces, which is actual violence, which sucks…or we’re gonna do a general strike, finally, and we’re gonna shut this s**t down and we’re gonna have a critical mass of people withdraw their labor.

Politics behind the scenes! A rare glimpse behind the curtain as Van, Lyle, and guest Andrew Facini got together to record an episode on Crimson Tide (coming in due course!). As sometimes happens, their conversation took a massive detour into the politics of the day, and it was urgent enough to share now as its own episode:

* The folly of investing in nuclear “deterrence” while America makes an authoritarian turn;

* The politics of emergency that Trump is mobilizing to deploy the US military in US cities;

* Why a general strike in America is both inevitable and impossible;

* What it means that MAGA is a counter-revolutionary force;

* Why civil war depends on whether the military follows/keeps following unlawful orders;

* Why Trump’s unlimited national security powers have everything to exaggerating the China threat; and

* Why MAGA intellectuals are bad military strategists.

For only $2 per week, you can access our vast (and growing) archive of anti-imperialist film conversation and much more.

Van and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames, John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that accidentally foresaw the age of algorithmic warfare.

What begins as a teenage prank—Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman breaking into what he thinks is a computer game—quickly becomes a meditation on automation, deterrence, and human judgment in systems built to annihilate. Together, the group unpacks how WarGames’ “WOPR” supercomputer prefigures today’s AI decision-making, where machines learn to “take men out of the loop.” They trace how the film’s closing revelation (“The only winning move is not to play”) echoes across four decades of nuclear strategy and modern debates over escalation, autonomy, and control.

The conversation ranges from NORAD and machine learning to the moral limits of deterrence, the psychology of Cold-War adolescence, and the comic absurdity of believing one can win an unwinnable game. Like Dr. Strangelove before it, WarGames shows us a military machine that runs on fear, faith, and code, and a civilization learning to live with its own programmed self-destruction.

Further Reading

Sam’s professional page

Andy’s professional page

“Strategy & Conscience (The Book Review We Need),” by Van

Telehack, a retro internet simulator recommended by Andy

The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, by Sharon Weinberger

The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, by Paul N. Edwards

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg

Teaser from the Episode

WarGames Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames, John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that accidentally foresaw the age of algorithmic warfare.

What begins as a teenage prank—Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman breaking into what he thinks is a computer game—quickly becomes a meditation on automation, deterrence, and human judgment in systems built to annihilate. Together, the group unpacks how WarGames’ “WOPR” supercomputer prefigures today’s AI decision-making, where machines learn to “take men out of the loop.” They trace how the film’s closing revelation (“The only winning move is not to play”) echoes across four decades of nuclear strategy and modern debates over escalation, autonomy, and control.

The conversation ranges from NORAD and machine learning to the moral limits of deterrence, the psychology of Cold-War adolescence, and the comic absurdity of believing one can win an unwinnable game. Like Dr. Strangelove before it, WarGames shows us a military machine that runs on fear, faith, and code, and a civilization learning to live with its own programmed self-destruction.

Further Reading

Sam’s professional page

Andy’s professional page

“Strategy & Conscience (The Book Review We Need),” by Van

Telehack, a retro internet simulator recommended by Andy

The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, by Sharon Weinberger

The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, by Paul N. Edwards

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg

WarGames Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by historian Dan Borus, Professor Emeritus at the University of Rochester, to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, a film that continues to define political satire as much as it mocks the very impulses that make satire necessary. The conversation revisits the Cold War’s toxic blend of paranoia, sexual repression, and bureaucratic madness, drawing from Borus’s essay “The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name in the War Room.” Together they trace how Kubrick and screenwriter Terry Southern transformed the age of McCarthyism and “moral hygiene” into a Freudian nightmare of militarized masculinity, nuclear brinkmanship, and closet panic.

What does it mean that the “rational men” who planned for nuclear annihilation also spoke in the language of purity, fluids, and perversion? How does Dr. Strangelove turn Cold War homophobia back on its accusers? And what do the film’s grotesque sexual metaphors—its refueling scenes, cowboy bombs, and “ten women per man” survival plan—tell us about a society that loves peace through domination?

Further Reading

“The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name in the War Room,” by Dan

“The Dark Satire of Pete Hegseth’s Quantico Speech,” by Lyle

“Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” by Carol Cohn

The End of Victory Culture by Tom Englehardt

War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination by H. Bruce Franklin

Teaser from the Episode

Dr. Strangelove Trailer

Artist and writer Eli Valley joins us to wrestle with Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the director’s retelling of the 1972 Olympics massacre and Israel’s subsequent campaign of assassinations. The film is meticulously crafted, humanizing Avner and his team while layering in hesitation, doubt, and the weight of family. It also dramatizes Palestinian lives with unusual care for Hollywood, even if the balance tilts toward Israeli perspectives and familiar tropes about “moral” violence. We talk through its most affecting set-pieces—the aborted bombing when a child answers the phone, the grotesque mix of mazel tovs and murders, and Avner’s paranoia in New York—while asking what it means to live inside this endless dialogue of revenge and reprisal.

Our conversation with Eli traces the film’s political afterlife: the fury it provoked in Ariel Sharon’s government, the defenses mounted in the American press, and the broader struggle over how violence is represented on screen. We also reflect on its haunting aesthetics, from Spielberg’s chilled tones to the intimacy of family meals punctured by death to the final cut of the World Trade Center. And how these choices underscore the film’s central verdict about vengeance corroding all. Whatever its blind spots, Munich remains one of Spielberg’s most morally serious films, a rare Hollywood attempt to stage the derangement of “tribal” obligation while still respecting the humanity of all involved.

Further Reading

Eli’s website

“Steven Spielberg’s unforgivable sin”, by Eli Valley

Michael Oren interview on Munich

“What ‘Munich’ Left Out,” by David Brooks“Israeli consul attack’s Spielberg’s Munich as ‘problematic’,” by Gary Younge

Fürstenfeldbruck 1972 police operation (Official history and documents)

Munich Trailer

The Guardian arts writer Adrian Horton joins us to discuss The Report, Scott Z. Burns’s dramatization of Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones’s investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. We follow the film’s flashbacks and committee-room battles, tracing how “enhanced interrogation” was engineered by Air Force psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, sanitized by lawyers like John Yoo, and sold to White House officials while the FBI’s Ali Soufan was proving rapport-based interrogation actually worked. The movie captures both the bureaucratic slog—“just the facts” over years of reading transcripts—and the political cowardice that let CIA leaders lie to presidents of both parties, cover up deaths like Gul Rahman’s, and spin torture as having led to bin Laden.

Our conversation with Adrian turns to how the film frames institutional failure and accountability: John Brennan’s CIA spying on Senate staff, Obama’s refusal to pursue prosecutions, and the spectacle of Feinstein, Udall, and McCain trying to salvage transparency while the agency rebranded its crimes. We talk aesthetics, too, including the film’s cool tones, Adam Driver’s restrained performance, and how it stages the clash between truth-seeking and “middle ground” politics. At stake, then and now, is whether brutality gets buried by euphemism and liberal adulation of “patriotic” spies, or confronted for what it is.

Further Reading

Adrian Horton’s writing at The Guardian

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Torture Report”

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, by Ali Soufan

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman

Teaser from the Episode

The Report Trailer

The combat journalist Wes Morgan joins us to unpack Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor—a film that packages “victim-hero” mythology in SEAL-recruiting gloss—alongside John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), a studio-era propaganda relic made with heavy Pentagon help and shot largely at Fort Benning. We track shared tropes: the “good foreigner/child,” the moral theater around killing noncombatants, and how both movies swap unsavory political histories for clean, consumable heroism. From Lone Survivor’s Pashtunwali turn to Green Berets’ cartoon villainy, we ask what these stories make both legible and invisible.

Wes brings the granular Afghanistan context that Hollywood blurs: the Pech/Kunar campaigns and how special-operations logic, local powerbrokers, and U.S. prerogatives collided on the ground. And we contrast the films’ PR-friendly aesthetics with reporting on how the war was in fact fought, and what that meant for Afghans and Americans alike.

Further Reading

The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley by Wes Morgan“Marcus Lutrell’s Savior, Mohammad Gulab, Claims ‘Lone Survivor’ Got It Wrong,” by R.M. Schneiderman

“Exception(s) to the Rule(s): Civilian Harm, Oversight, and Accountability in the Shadow Wars,” by the Center for Civilians in Conflict

Roger Ebert’s review of The Green Berets (1968)

No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, by Anand Gopal

Teaser from the Episode

Lone Survivor Trailer

Osita Nwanevu joins us to revisit David Lean’s epic with an eye toward empire’s soft power: the seductive aesthetics that make conquest look noble, even as the film telegraphs its own critique. We track Lawrence’s zigzag between identification and revulsion—his “It’s clean” quip about the desert; the Deraa trauma; the “no prisoners” massacre—and the way racism on the British side (“bloody wogs”) refracts his alienation back home.

Along the way we talk casting (Omar Sharif’s indelible Sherif Ali, Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal), the brittle politics of the Arab National Council, and how Sykes–Picot shadows the dream of independence that flickers and fails in the final act. Osita helps us tie the film’s Orientalist grammar to real-world partition and mandate politics without losing sight of media incentives: the American reporter’s hunt for a marketable hero mirrors the alliances Faisal seeks and the headlines the West wants. (On Osita’s work and his new book framing a more democratic American project, see below.)

If the movie flirts with myth, the history complicates it: wartime bargains that prefigured the French defeat of Faisal’s forces by 1920 and the rechanneling of Hashemite rule, the contested record on Deraa, and the indispensable (if compromised) architects of a new Middle East. We sit with the film’s ambivalence—how it both glamorizes and subverts the imperial gaze—and ask what a less self-exculpatory storytelling tradition might look like, on screen and in policy.

Further Reading

Osita’s website

Osita’s debut book

“The True Story of Lawrence of Arabia,” by Scott Anderson

“What Gertrude Bell’s Letters Remind Us About the Founding of Iraq,” by Elias Muhanna

Lawrence of Arabia Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by Ben and Jordano from the Remember Shuffle podcast to take on The Hunt for Red October (1990), John McTiernan’s Cold War submarine thriller packed with an all-star cast. Sean Connery’s Ramius may be the most Scottish Russian ever put on screen, but the real star is the film’s endless roll call of talent and character actors—from Alec Baldwin and James Earl Jones to Sam Neill, Tim Curry, Stellan Skarsgård, and Courtney B. Vance—each grounding a plot that often becomes too convoluted for its own good. The trio unpacks how these performances and sharp writing moments (like the recurring teddy bear motif) elevate the film into its iconic status.

At the same time, the conversation digs into the politics underlying the spectacle: the film’s inflation of the Soviet threat, its naturalization of U.S. military dominance, and its childlike portrayal of Cold War geopolitics as a cat-and-mouse (eagle-and-bear?) game. By the film’s end, this game seems less about preventing nuclear Armageddon than about obscuring the everyday violence and exploitation guaranteed by imperial competition, particularly in waters and shores well below the Northern Hemisphere.

Further Reading/Listening

Remember Shuffle Podcast

The Rivalry Peril by Van and Michael Brenes

The Cold War’s Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin

“The Lethal Crescent: When the Cold War Was Hot” by Daniel Immerwahr

Van and Lyle’s Appearance on Remember Shuffle

Teaser from the Episode

The Hunt for Red October Trailer

In this episode, Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and author Noah Hurowitz (El Chapo) to discuss Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, the sweeping 2010 miniseries about the infamous Venezuelan militant Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. The conversation explores how Carlos’ life story illuminates both the allure and the pitfalls of revolutionary violence: how genuine struggles for liberation can attract both the most earnest and courageous fighters, as well as opportunists like Carlos who drift into becoming hired guns for despots and intelligence services.

Along the way, we talk about the film’s depictions of groups like the PFLP, Black September, and the German Revolutionary Cells; Carlos’ entanglements with figures from Saddam Hussein to Muammar Gaddafi to Nicolae Ceaușescu; and the moral contrasts between Carlos and comrades such as Hans-Joachim Klein (“Angie”), who ultimately chose conscience over bloodshed. The miniseries captures both the romance and disarray of internationalist militancy, while reminding us why the long-term task must be to build societies—and a global order—where such violence is no longer called into being.

Further Reading

El Chapo by Noah Hurowitz

Noah at The Intercept

Jackal by John Follain

Abu Nidal by Patrick Seale

Teaser from the Episode

Carlos Trailer