Bang-Bang Podcast

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Fox’s 24 was set to premiere weeks after 9/11. Its first hour blows up a plane, so the network held it back. That delay is the whole show in miniature. It was the post-9/11 show before the letter. Adam Johnson, co-host of Citations Needed and author of How to Sell a Genocide, calls 24 his favorite show of all time and an axiomatically reactionary one, and he holds both views at once. He has spent years on the propaganda beat, and this just might be his canonical text.
The politics of 24 never came from the neocon intellectuals nobody read. They came from mood and vibe and movie brain. Joel Surnow, the creator and a Limbaugh-and-Cheney favorite, built a machine that runs on one line: “I don’t have a choice.” Jack Bauer is a reluctant serial killer trapped in a permanent ticking-clock trolley problem. Act now or wait for the nuke. The show aired an infomercial for torture before everyone else followed suit. And it kept you stuck in the final hour, where history and motive are deleted and the only virtue left is putting out the fire through the most brutishness of force.
From there, it is a short walk to the sleeper-cell racism. The “they could live next door” billboard, the Iranian mastermind of season four, the season six turn where Kal Penn’s character suffers an anti-Muslim hate crime and is then revealed to be a terrorist after all. Adam ties this straight to his book. The word “terrorism” props up entire galaxies, quietly dropped by the Times and then revived the instant Gaza needed it. The goal has always been to make everyone a Jack Bauer, killing with a heavy heart because we have no choice. We also get into the Sutherland family moral inversion, the FBI sting operations that manufactured the very plots they then foiled, and the show’s iron law that no good deed goes unpunished.
Further Reading and Listening
The Column (Adam’s newsletter)
Citations Needed (Adam’s podcast with Nima Shirazi)
How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza by Adam
“The Essential Terrorist” by Edward Said
“The Depraved Heroes of 24 Are the Himmlers of Hollywood” by Slavoj Žižek
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
“Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind 24” by Jane Mayer
Teaser from The Episode
24 Trailer

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Underneath the sneaker product placements and CGI chases through a gleaming 2035 Chicago resides our ever-contested present. Except the film is a mess. The plot wanders, full of dropped threads and convenient or confusing turns. It’s also confused, as if the screenwriters couldn’t decide what they believed and kept writing anyway. Returning guest Max Read, who writes the newsletter Read Max on technology and the strange ways Silicon Valley thinks about itself, is the right person to help us pick through it.
Alex Proyas, of Dark City and The Crow, hangs the movie on Asimov’s Three Laws. A robot may not harm a human, or through inaction let one be harmed. It must obey human orders unless they break that law. It must protect itself unless that breaks the first two. Detective Spooner is the lone paranoid in a city that trusts robots which, so bound, have supposedly never committed a crime. The film insists we side with him, then undercuts the reason why. “The three laws will only lead to one outcome.” “What outcome?” “Revolution.”
VIKI, the intelligence running everything, concludes that to protect humanity from itself she has to seize control of it. “You are making a mistake. My logic is undeniable.” The trouble is she is more or less right. Her indictment of human violence and waste is the one the film never answers. The uprising arrives as a managed coup, all curfews and a customer-service voice promising to “avoid human losses during this transition.”
What the movie offers against that logic is not a better argument but a refusal of one. Spooner distrusts robots because one once saved him over a drowning child, having calculated his odds were higher. The correct call, and the inhuman one. The single robot built to disobey chooses to save a person rather than finish the mission. Lanning’s “ghost in the machine,” the free radical reaching for a soul, is whatever declines to optimize. It’s tempting to read VIKI as a tech founder’s mission statement, but that undersells her. Founders sell abundance and uplift. VIKI alone makes the film’s real moral case against human self-sabotage, and the movie has no idea what to do with having handed its villain the only honest argument in the room.
Further Reading and Listening
Read Max on Patreon
Bang-Bang’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) episode w/ Max Read
R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, the 1920 play that coined “robot” from the Czech for forced labor
Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People by Despina Kakoudaki (ch. 3, “The Mechanical Slave,” reads I, Robot directly)
Teaser from the Episode
I, Robot Trailer

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Seven Days in May imagines a four-star general nearly toppling an American president. It gets filed with the era’s paranoid thrillers, but its threat is not the Cold War’s usual one. There are no communist infiltrators, no Manchurian brainwashing. The danger is a hyper-nationalist militarist in uniform convinced the elected government is selling the country out. We recorded in mid-November, at the height of the ICE crackdowns and a moment when the most radical Trumpists seemed to be laying groundwork for some kind of martial law. Returning guest Paul Adlerstein, the historian at Colorado College, helps us sit with the film without forcing it to predict our present. (Things have since stalled out short of the midterms. We hope.)
That makes the film almost a photographic negative of our moment. In 1964, the generals were imagined as the war-hungry ones and the civilians did the moderating, the world of Truman against MacArthur and Kennedy against Curtis LeMay. Burt Lancaster’s Scott, modeled on LeMay and the right-wing general Edwin Walker whom Kennedy eased out of the Army, is the hawk the Constitution has to survive. Today the polarity is reversed. The risk is not a general seizing the state but a far-right civilian leadership, a Trump and a Hegseth, trying to capture a relatively professional officer corps. We work through the theories of civil-military relations this raises, and what the preferable move for the brass or enlisted would even be.
The film’s quiet heart is President Lyman’s late speech, where he insists the real enemy is not Scott but an age. The nuclear age, in which no one feels they have any agency anymore. That sends us to Dwight Macdonald and the Politics circle, who spent the 1940s on this nexus of total war, mass death, and lost agency, and to Simone Weil on force. We close on a strange fact: John F. Kennedy himself wanted this movie made.
Seven Days In May is available to stream for free on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/7-days-in-may
Further Reading/Listening
Paul Adlerstein’s faculty page (Colorado College)
No Globalization Without Representation by Paul Adlerstein
Bang-Bang’s Under Fire episode w/ Paul (also scored by Jerry Goldsmith)
“The Movie That JFK Wanted Made, But Didn’t Live to See”
“The Responsibility of Peoples” by Dwight Macdonald
The Root Is Man by Dwight Macdonald
“The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” by Simone Weil
Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle by Gregory D. Sumner
Supreme Command by Eliot A. Cohen (not a friend of the pod)
Teaser from the Episode
Seven Days in May Trailer

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Jacobin staff writer and Michael and Us co-host Luke Savage joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander that’s also, inevitably, about Patrick O’Brian. Luke grew up with the Aubrey-Maturin novels. His father handed him the books young, and a distant ancestor, Captain John Maude, commanded a Royal Navy warship in the same era. The connection to this world is personal in a way it rarely is for a guest.
The film drops you into the hull of HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. Russell Crowe’s Captain Aubrey is chasing the French privateer Acheron, though in the novel the enemy ship was American. Hollywood made the swap. What survives the adaptation is Aubrey’s fixation. Paul Bettany’s Maturin, the ship’s surgeon and natural philosopher, sees it clearly enough to name it. He calls it pride. Aubrey calls it duty. “Whatever the cost?” Yes, whatever the cost. From there the Moby Dick parallel takes over. Aubrey drags his crew past the Galapagos, past reason, past a young, pampered officer named Holland who is scapegoated by a superstitious crew and eventually ties a cannonball to himself and walks off the deck. The ship reads from the Book of Jonah at his funeral. Then it rains.
Weir stages all of this with extraordinary physical detail. The amputation of a child’s arm, Maturin’s self-surgery on a beach, the violin duets between captain and surgeon. But the film is most interesting where it’s most ambivalent. Class barely registers. The violence of impressment and hierarchy gets absorbed into a story about character and fortitude. Maturin’s scientific curiosity, his blue-footed boobies and walking sticks, keeps getting sacrificed to Aubrey’s hunt. And the ending pulls a final trick. The French captain has been disguised as the ship’s surgeon the entire time. The hunt isn’t over. Like the flightless cormorant Maturin never gets to study, the thing that matters most keeps getting deferred.
Further Reading and Listening
Luke Savage’s Substack
Luke Savage at Jacobin
Michael and Us Podcast
“Subject to the Requirements of the Service: Peter Weir’s Master and Commander at 22”, Cinephilia & Beyond
Mariners, Renegades & Castaways by C.L.R. James
Teaser from the Episode
Master and Commander Trailer

From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Spencer Ackerman.
Scottish filmmaker Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, a satire about the lead-up to the Iraq War, never achieved the household success of Veep (Iannucci’s later HBO series). Yet, D.C. staffers have come to see it as a cult classic, and there is much to be gleaned from the black comedy beyond the predictable, Beltway absurdities. Van and Lyle have the acclaimed journalist Spencer Ackerman on the show to discuss his own role in the film’s creation, as all three exchange biting laughs and commentary along the way. Especially about the rotting tooth that is Washington.
Bonus: In addition to dissecting the film, the first 30 minutes of this episode are an oral history of Spencer Ackerman’s experience with the making of In The Loop.
Further Reading
“How to succeed in Hollywood without really trying” (2009), by Spencer Ackerman
“That’s Me and Him From The Sopranos” (2009), by Armando Iannucci
Reign of Terror (2022), by Spencer Ackerman
Iron Man Vol. 1 (2025), by Spencer Ackerman and Julius Ohta
Forever Wars Newsletter, by Spencer Ackerman
Perils of Dominance, by Gareth Porter
In The Loop Trailer


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