Bang-Bang Podcast

An occasional glimpse behind the curtain as Van (missing Lyle!) sits down with writer David Klion and historian David Austin Walsh. Their candid convo ranges from the politics of liberal Zionism to personal radicalization and the history of the United States as the world’s most successful (but ultimately failed?) settler-colonial project founded on genocide.

You can catch this chat wherever you listen to podcasts, and the full video version is included as an unlisted YouTube link, below.

Look for David and David as recurring guests on our Andor mini-series.

Van and Lyle are joined by journalist David Klion and returning guest Paul Adlerstein to unpack Episodes 4 through 6 of Andor Season 2, when the slow-burn tension of the early arc erupts into full-fledged moral crisis.

They discuss how Ghorman—rendered with a kind of haute-bourgeois, French fusion aesthetic—is not only targeted by the Empire’s military clampdown, but also by its Fox News–style media wing, and fashion becomes a proxy for disloyalty. Meanwhile, Mothma’s effort to secure a de-escalation vote in defense of Ghorman is met with apathy or cowardice by her Senate colleagues, nominal liberals who fold in the face of imperial momentum.

The group also notes Bix’s PTSD, a trauma-riddled silence that now borders on suicidal despair, as well as Luthen and Saw’s parallel unraveling. One hides behind charm, the other behind mania, but both embody the same truth, that revolution is not for the sane.

“Do you think I’m crazy?” Saw asks. “Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane.” And Luthen proves it, growing impatient with Mothma’s delays and willing to let Ghorman burn to protect the long game.

Further Reading

Paul’s website

David on Twitter

“Andor Is the Best Star Wars You Will Ever See,” by David Klion

Project Fulcrum: Nemik’s Weekly Manifesto

The Romance of American Communism, by Vivian Gornick

Teaser from the Episode:

Andor Season 2 Trailer

Slate culture editor Jenny G. Zhang returns to the pod for our initial foray into the first block of Andor Season 2.

Van and Jenny discuss the all-too-familiar labor exploitation on the agricultural planet Mina Rau, and how it relies on illegal immigration to remain profitable; the way that the Galactic Empire offers license to the patriarchal impulse of some to dominate others; and the secretive, elitist logic that leads agents of empire into committing genocide in order to secure critical minerals…and we are of course referring to Ghorman and the Empire’s need to extract it for the Death Star.

Plus: Senator Mon Mothma’s performance of desperation at her daughter’s wedding—dancing like no one’s watching with a face that can’t hide agony…totally the vibe of 2025.

Catch Up on Our Season 1 Coverage

Andor Season 2 Trailer

Otto Preminger’s Exodus isn’t just a sweeping Hollywood epic but a foundational text of the postwar Zionist imagination. Van and Lyle are joined by journalist David Meir Grossman to dissect the 1960 film and its enduring legacy. Together, they parse the film’s aesthetics and ideology, its thinly veiled apologetics for settler colonialism, and its staging of Jewish suffering as license for state power.

From the very first scene, where a tour guide on Cyprus rattles off its many conquerors with oblivious irony, the film makes clear that it sees empire not as problem but backdrop. The British are cast as bureaucratic brutes, the Arabs as angry fanatics, and the Jews as righteous protagonists caught between. But this story collapses under its own contradictions: The hunger strike led by Jewish detainees mirrors tactics long used by Palestinians; mothers proclaim they would rather die with their children than be deported, a form of resistance the film treats with reverence. Yet when Palestinians make similar claims decades later, they are cast as monstrous, even suicidal.

The conversation also revisits the film’s iconic characters. Paul Newman’s Ari Ben-Canaan embodies the Zionist hero as charismatic, haunted, and certain that Jewish liberation can be achieved without reckoning with anyone else’s. Then there’s Kitty Fremont, the well-meaning American nurse whose imperious naïveté mirrors the U.S.’s own posture toward the region.

David, Van, and Lyle trace how Exodus anticipates not only the mythologies of the Israeli state but also the moral blind spots of its liberal defenders. They explore the film’s revealing attempts at nuance—such as the friendship between Ari and the Palestinian character Taha (played by the white American heartthrob John Derek)—and why those gestures fall flat in the face of the larger narrative. If Exodus helped consecrate Israel’s founding story for American audiences, this episode tries to read between its frames.

Further Reading

David on Twitter

The Question of Zion (2005), by Jacqueline Rose

“Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” (1979), by Edward Said

Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel (2017), by Eli Valley

On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (2017), by Ella Shohat

Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (2019), by Noura Erakat

Teaser from the Episode

Exodus Trailer

The full video episode for our coverage of Exodus is available as an unlisted link on YouTube, just for paid subscribers, below:

Van (minus Lyle) is joined by historian David Austin Walsh to explore episodes 10-12 of Andor’s first-season finale. Their conversation focuses on Andor’s embrace of revolution and the surprising political realism of the show’s portrayal of labor exploitation and social uprisings. Van and David also discuss liberalism’s failure to inspire meaningful change in the real world—why has no electoral politician in our lifetime ever roused our souls like Marva did in episode’s 12’s revolt on the planet Ferrix? What might that say about the rise of fascism in the 2020s?

Further Reading

David Austin Walsh on Twitter

Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, by David Austin Walsh

“Luthen Rael Embodies Andor’s Gray Side,” by Roxana Hadadi

“A Tale of Miners and Prisoners,” by RK Upadhya

Teaser

Andor Season 1 Trailer

An occasional glimpse behind the curtain as Van (missing Lyle!) sits down with historian David Austin Walsh to gossip a bit about the conservative movement, far-right politics, and how Van ended up unwittingly studying at a paleocon university.

David joined the Bang-Bang Podcast to discuss Star Wars’ Andor (episode forthcoming) and we were able to get some great convo before recording.

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Van and Lyle are joined once again by historian Paul Adlerstein to delve into episodes 8 through 10 of Andor. The conversation traces the jarring split between the dystopian labor camps of Narkina 5 and the sterile dinner parties of Coruscant’s elite, two poles of the same imperial order. They examine the moral complexities faced by characters like Mon Mothma, who grapples with the potential betrothal of her daughter to secure rebel funding, and how sectarianism and hard strategy collide in the rebel underground.

The trio also discusses the depiction of solidarity among prisoners, the moral dilemmas of resistance, and the show's not so subtle allusion to historical markers like the Spanish Civil War. And then there’s Luthen Rael—coldblooded handler, ghost of revolutions past—who delivers one of the most unforgettable monologues in the history of the franchise. What does it mean to sacrifice everything for a dream you’ll never see? Or to damn yourself in the name of liberation? And what are we to make of Andor, helping to build the very weapon that will later kill him?

Further Reading

Paul’s website

Project Fulcrum: Nemik’s Weekly Manifesto

"Ali's Theme" – The Battle of Algiers Soundtrack

“Luthen Rael Embodies Andor’s Gray Side,” by Roxana Hadadi

“A Tale of Miners and Prisoners,” by RK Upadhya

Teaser

Andor Season 1 Trailer

The pod returns to Andor with Slate culture editor Jenny G. Zhang and, for the first time, the historian Paul Adlerstein. This second installment covers the Aldhani arc, Coruscant as pristine imperial metropole, and metropolitan contempt for the indigenous periphery—writ large in their treatment of the Aldhani tribes.

They discuss the protagonist's mirroring of Ali’s radicalization in The Battle of Algiers, how Ali’s theme song from that film makes a near-identical appearance in Andor’s own opening music, and how the heist sequence was inspired by Simon Montefiore’s Young Stalin—too perfect given Montefiore’s latest turn as apologist for America’s most murderous outpost.

Special attention is also lent to Mon Mothma, the electoral progressive forced to test her own commitments; Dedra Meero, the rising star of the surveillance state; and Syril Karn, the corporate rent-a-cop turned humiliated bureaucrat whose debacle paves the way for direct imperial control.

Arvel Skeen, too, the treacherous militant whose final and fateful words to Cass also mark a life-changing challenge:

I knew when you first came into camp. We were both born in the hole and all we know is how to climb over others to get out.

Further Reading

Jenny’s website

Jenny on Bluesky

Jenny on Twitter

Paul’s website

Project Fulcrum: Nemik’s Weekly Manifesto

"Ali's Theme" – The Battle of Algiers Soundtrack

“The Andor Dilemma: Pop Culture’s Place in Leftist Strategy,” by Van Jackson

The Battle of Algiers Episode

Teaser from the Episode

Andor Season 1 Trailer

This is the second half of our conversation on 1998’s The Siege, starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Annette Benning, and many more. Be sure to check out Part I, as well as our back catalog!

Long before the Patriot Act, long before “See Something, Say Something,” long before 9/11—there was The Siege. Released in 1998, this Bruce Willis–Denzel Washington vehicle depicts a post–terror attack New York placed under martial law. The city is bombed, neighborhoods are surveilled, and Arab and Muslim men are rounded up en masse, held indefinitely in cages under the Brooklyn Bridge. And yet, in perhaps the most jarring twist of all, the whole thing was co-written by Lawrence Wright, the celebrated journalist behind the GWOT-era classic, The Looming Tower.

In this episode, Van and Lyle are joined once again by screenwriter Kevin Fox to revisit The Siege, not just as an artifact of pre-9/11 paranoia, but as an uncanny rehearsal for everything that would come after. Together they break down the film’s oscillation between prescience and myopia, from Bruce Willis as cartoonish generalissimo to Denzel Washington as constitutionalist good cop. The story’s themes of blowback, anti-Muslim hysteria, and civil-military overreach may come off as heavy-handed or superficial, but there are so many moments that still hit disturbingly close to home.

Van, Lyle, and Kevin ask: What can a work like The Siege tell us about liberal complicity in the War on Terror? What happens when a film simultaneously warns of repression while making its own contribution to the atmosphere of fear? And what’s with the horny thermal cam surveillance scene?

Further Reading

Kevin’s Website

“The Film That Taught Me About Blowback As a Kid,” by Van Jackson

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, by William T. Cavanaugh

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, by Mahmood Mamdani

Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, by Deepa Kumar

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson

Teaser from the Episode

The Siege Trailer

Van and Lyle kick off their Andor series with Slate culture editor Jenny G. Zhang, diving into the show’s slow-burn opening arc where imperial bootlickers, jealous love interests, and rebels in the making collide on the Outer Rim. They discuss what makes Andor—a property of the Star Wars universe—feel different than its franchise kin, from its social realism to its psychological bite. If The Battle of Algiers looms large, so does Parable of the Sower, especially the show’s landscape of authoritarian company towns and the simmering hints of a revolutionary break.

They talk about the Preox-Morlana security force as East India Company meets Blackwater, and Deputy Inspector Syril Karn as the story’s omnipresent archetype—the insecure man desperate to matter. Just like the pathetic rent-a-cops Andor is forced to kill, and the equally envious Timm Karlo, another tragic loser who dies trying to make up for his fateful angst.

History appears to turn not so much on generals and emperors, but on the choices and contradictions of broken men. Men stuck in systems they didn’t build, and whose real breaking is yet to come.

Further Reading

Jenny’s website

Jenny on Bluesky

Jenny on Twitter

“The Andor Dilemma: Pop Culture’s Place in Leftist Strategy,” by Van Jackson

“Introducing Andor Analysed, Part 1,” by Jamie Woodcock

The Battle of Algiers Episode

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi

Teaser from the Episode

Andor Season 1 Trailer