There is a kind of commentary that soothes. It tells you the system is basically sound, that the right candidate or the right policy tweak will set things straight, and that your job is to stay calm and wait. Matthew Cooke does not make that kind of commentary. The documentary filmmaker behind How to Make Money Selling Drugs and Survivors Guide to Prison now spends his time making short, blunt videos that refuse to let any single crisis be discussed in isolation.
Three of his most recent pieces, released within roughly two weeks of each other this October, look at first glance like they have nothing in common. One is about a vote at a British party conference on Zionism. One is about the American midterm elections now just ten days away. One is about France burning over the cost of living. Watch them back to back, though, and they stop looking like three topics. They start looking like three rooms in the same house.
This post walks through all three, evenly, in Cooke’s own terms, and then threads them together using the key he himself hands us. It does not pull punches, because Cooke does not. But it also does something his videos, by design, do not: it lays out where the strongest pushback lands, so that readers can test the argument instead of simply absorbing it.
The Key: King’s Three Evils
Cooke opens his midterms video with a passage from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that works as a master key for all three videos:
“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed.”
Racism. Economic exploitation. Militarism. King called them the triple evils, and he insisted they were not three separate problems but one interlocking machine. Line Cooke’s three videos up against that passage and they snap into place. The Green Party video is about racism and the military force required to sustain it. The France video is about economic exploitation, the quiet transfer of what belonged to everyone into the hands of a few. And the midterms video is about the structure itself, and why a ballot alone cannot dismantle a machine that was built to survive ballots.
Take them one at a time.
Video One: “Zionism Is Racism. UK’s Green Party Just Voted.”
What Actually Happened
On Sunday, October 4, 2026, members of the Green Party of England and Wales, meeting at their annual conference in Brighton, passed a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism. The vote was 1,022 in favor and 813 against. The motion declares the Greens an anti-Zionist party, says Zionism will be treated as any other form of racism under the party’s anti-racism policy, and backs a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine with equal rights for everyone who lives there.
The reaction was immediate and ferocious. Israel’s government said it now viewed the party as giving legitimacy to terrorism, and its president called the decision a disgrace. Britain’s Chief Rabbi condemned it as poisonous antisemitism. The ruling Labour Party and the Conservatives both piled on. Inside the party itself, four of the five Green MPs had opposed the motion, and party leader Zack Polanski was not even in the room for the vote.
Cooke’s Charge
Cooke’s video meets all of that head on and does not flinch. He defines Zionism, in his own description of the video, as a European ethno-nationalist movement to establish a Jewish-majority homeland in Palestine, and he argues that achieving and maintaining that majority has required ethnic cleansing and ethnic partition. In Cooke’s framing, the Greens did not invent an outrage. They said out loud what the record on the ground already shows.
His argument rests on a simple, uncomfortable moral consistency. The twentieth century, he argues, taught the world that states built on the supremacy of one ethnic group over another produce catastrophe. Ethno-nationalism was supposed to be the thing we fought a world war to defeat. If displacing a people to secure a demographic majority is wrong when anyone else does it, Cooke asks, on what principle does it become acceptable here?
And he is careful, as serious critics on this side of the debate are, to separate a political ideology from a people and a faith. Cooke’s target is a state project, not Jews and not Judaism. Many Jews reject Zionism; many Zionists are not Jewish. Treating opposition to a political program as hatred of an entire people, in his view, is precisely the move that has kept this conversation frozen for decades.
Cooke also points to history. This is not the first time the claim has been made on an international stage. In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution determining that Zionism is a form of racism. That resolution was revoked in 1991, by a vote of 111 to 25, after a sustained campaign led by the United States. To Cooke, the revocation was an act of power, not a correction of the record, and the Greens have simply picked the language back up.
The demand that falls out of his argument is stark: not another ethnostate of any kind, but equal rights for every human being between the river and the sea. One person, one vote, one law.
Video Two: “France Protests Are a Western Spring. America Is Next.”
The Great Sell-Off
If the first video is about who gets to belong to a land, the second is about who gets to own it. Cooke opens with a line that should stop every reader cold: your government used to own things on your behalf. Land. Housing. Utilities. Rail. Water. Energy.
Then, starting in the 1980s, Western governments sold nearly all of it, and, in Cooke’s telling, cut taxes on the very buyers at the same time. They called it privatization. Britain nationalized coal, steel, rail, gas, electricity, water and telecoms, then sold the lot between 1979 and 1996. The United States, Cooke argues, did not even bother with a proper sale. It simply gave things away: land, minerals, oil, broadcast spectrum, public housing.
The Arithmetic of Being Robbed
Here is where Cooke stops sounding like an activist and starts sounding like an accountant, which is what makes this video so hard to dismiss. He cites the following figures:
In the 1970s, net public wealth in Western countries stood somewhere between 40 and 100 percent of national income. Today, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, it is roughly minus 30 percent. The public, collectively, owns less than it owes. National wealth is now, in his words, entirely private.
Broke governments now borrow to survive, and they borrow from the same wealthy class that bought the public assets. That loan is called a bond.
The United States now owes some $40 trillion in bonds, and interest alone has passed $1 trillion a year, paid by taxpayers to bondholders.
The top 10 percent of Americans hold nearly 70 percent of all US wealth. The bottom half hold 2.5 percent.
Sit with that sequence. First the public’s shared assets are sold to the wealthy at a discount. Then the government, now poorer, borrows money from those same wealthy people. Then working people pay the interest. Cooke’s point is not subtle: this is not a market accident. It is a conveyor belt that moves wealth upward, and it has been running for forty years.
He then closes the exits. Cuts won’t fix it, he argues, because cutting services is the disease, not the cure. Growth can’t fix it, because growth has been flowing upward the entire time. That leaves three options. Tax working people harder. Keep dismantling public services. Or tax hoarded wealth and return essential infrastructure to the people. The first two are what governments keep choosing. The third is the one the people who own everything spend fortunes to keep off the table.
France in the Streets
The French are living out Cooke’s thesis in real time. What began in late September as student blockades in the poor northern suburbs of Paris, over overcrowded classrooms, missing teachers and crumbling buildings, became a nationwide revolt against inequality and the fraying of public services. On October 17, it fused with a revived Yellow Vest movement, with unions, farmers, retirees and climate activists, in demonstrations against the cost of living across France. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said some 1,200 people were arrested that day. Some of it turned violent; a city hall in Limoges burned.
Cooke calls this a Western Spring, an echo of the Arab Spring, this time in the countries that once believed they were immune. And his warning to American viewers is in the title: America is next. The same sell-off happened here. The same debt structure exists here. The same wealth concentration exists here. The only thing missing, he suggests, is the moment the public notices.
Video Three: “Midterms 2026 Won’t Save You”
The shortest of the three videos, about four minutes, is the one that pulls the other two together, and it is the one most likely to make readers angry, because it challenges the single civic act most of us have been taught to treat as sacred.
Cooke does not tell anyone to stay home. His message, almost word for word, is this: vote like your life depends on it. Then comes the turn. Voting, he argues, will only slow the clock. It cannot stop it.
Why? Because of the King passage above. If racism, economic exploitation and militarism are welded together, then no single election, no single party and no single candidate can pull them apart. Every party that wins inside the current structure inherits the current structure: the same donors, the same debt, the same bondholders, the same military commitments abroad. Elections, in Cooke’s framing, decide who manages the machine. They do not decide whether the machine exists.
So his demand goes further than the ballot box. We must also act, he says, and act directly. Organize. Build power outside the election calendar, the way the civil rights movement did, not by waiting politely for the existing machinery to reform itself, but by making the old arrangement impossible to sustain.
With the midterms on November 3, that is a provocative message to release in late October. It is also, if you read King in full, a faithful one. King voted and urged others to vote. He also marched, boycotted, sat in and filled jails, because he understood that the vote was necessary but nowhere near sufficient.
Pulling the Thread Tight
Now lay the three videos side by side.
The Green Party video is about a population being told it does not fully belong in its own land, and about the force required to keep it that way. That is King’s first evil, racism, enforced by his third, militarism.
The France video is about entire national populations being told they no longer own their own countries, that the rail, the water, the energy and the housing belong to someone else now, and that they must pay interest on the privilege of living there. That is King’s second evil, economic exploitation.
The midterms video is about the structure that binds both together, and about the comfortable illusion that we can change it by checking a box once every two years.
The common denominator in all three is ownership. Who owns the land. Who owns the commons. Who owns political power. In each case, Cooke argues, a narrow group has claimed what belongs to everyone: one ethnic group over a shared territory, one economic class over a shared economy, one political class over a shared democracy. And in each case, the people on the losing end are told that objecting is extreme, dangerous or naive.
There is a free-speech thread running through all of this, too. Watch the response to the Greens: the fight was not only over Palestine but over whether the sentence itself could be spoken. Watch the response to France: protests over schools and groceries reframed as lawlessness. Watch the response to anyone who says voting is not enough: accused of suppressing turnout. Cooke’s videos are, among other things, an act of saying the unsayable in public, and the backlash each topic draws is part of his evidence.
The deepest charge in Cooke’s work is this: we keep treating these crises as separate stories, filed under foreign policy, economics and politics, and that separation is itself how the machine survives. You cannot dismantle one gear while leaving the others spinning. King said it in 1967. Cooke is saying it again, in 2026, to a generation that has run out of time to keep ignoring it.
Where the Pushback Lands
A strong argument should be able to stand next to its strongest critics. Here is where Cooke’s case meets real resistance.
On Zionism. Britain’s main Jewish communal bodies, the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, argue the opposite of Cooke: that Zionism is itself an anti-racist project, a refuge for Jews in their ancestral homeland after centuries of persecution. Many Jews see the movement as inseparable from their survival, and see a resolution singling it out as targeting them, whatever its authors intend. Inside the Green Party, MPs who opposed the motion warned that Zionism is a contested idea with no single definition, and that defining it by its worst outcomes alienates Jewish members and voters. Others argue that a political party is not the right body to redefine racism at all. And a single democratic state, however appealing in principle, is opposed by most Israelis and has no clear path to reality.
On privatization. Defenders argue that many state-run industries of the 1970s were inefficient and loss-making, that some privatized services improved, and that the negative public-wealth figure reflects rising public debt as much as asset sales. Economists also dispute how much revenue wealth taxes actually raise, since capital is mobile. And in France, it is worth noting that the protests have many authors with competing demands; the far right has also claimed them, and the government blames the hard left for inflaming them.
On the midterms. Critics of the “voting only slows the clock” argument point out that slowing the clock is not trivial. Election outcomes have decided court appointments, health coverage, climate rules and civil rights enforcement for millions of people. Movements and elections have historically worked best together, not in opposition. Cooke’s own message, “vote like your life depends on it,” arguably concedes this point.
None of these objections makes Cooke’s questions go away. But readers deserve to weigh them, not just hear one side shouted louder.
Why This Belongs on a Climate Site
Some readers will ask why a climate community is writing about Zionism, bond markets and the midterms. The answer is King’s answer: you cannot get rid of one evil without the others.
The Climate and Ecological Emergency is not a separate file sitting in its own drawer. The fossil fuel economy is the clearest example of Cooke’s ownership argument: the atmosphere is the ultimate commons, and a small number of owners have been allowed to fill it for profit while the public pays the bill in floods, fires and heat. Militarism burns staggering amounts of fuel and destroys the very ecosystems we depend on. Displacement, whether from war, from economic collapse or from rising seas, is fast becoming one of the defining human experiences of this century. And democracy is the only tool ordinary people have to change any of it.
That is why Climate Change Community frames this work around converging emergencies, not single issues. Cooke’s three videos are a sharp reminder that the climate fight is a fight over ownership, power and who counts as fully human. Adaptive Resiliency means learning to see those connections, and then organizing around them together.
What Now
Cooke’s prescription, in his own words, is to demand the solutions and to organize. Translated into something you can do this week:
Vote on November 3. Cooke says it plainly, and so do we. Then treat Election Day as the beginning of your civic work, not the end of it.
Watch all three videos yourself and form your own judgment. Then read the strongest critics of each. Competence comes from wrestling with the best version of the other side.
Learn who owns what where you live. Your water, your power, your transit, your housing stock. Public or private? When did that change, and who benefited?
Join something. A tenants’ union, a local climate group, a community resilience hub, a mutual aid network. King’s word was “organize,” and it still is.
Talk across lines. These are some of the most divisive topics on Earth. Dialogue, not shouting, is how communities hold together long enough to change anything.
Cooke’s final challenge is the one King left us with: the whole structure must be changed. That is not a slogan. It is a work order. The only question is whether we start on it before the structure finishes failing on its own.
Addendum: Why Climate Tribe Social Can Become the Robin Hood of the 21st Century
This post is an addendum to “Three Evils, One Structure: Matthew Cooke and the Case for Changing the Whole Thing.” Read that one first if you have not. This one answers the question it leaves hanging: all right, so what are we going to do about it?
In the companion post, I walked through three recent videos by filmmaker Matthew Cooke and threaded them together with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning about the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. The common denominator, I argued, was ownership. Who owns the land. Who owns the commons. Who owns political power. Cooke’s France video put it in one line that I have not been able to shake: your government used to own things on your behalf.
Then it sold them. Rail, water, energy, housing, spectrum. The public now owes more than it owns, and working people pay the interest on the privilege of living in their own countries.
It is easy to read that and feel nothing but anger. Anger is honest, but anger is not a plan. So here is mine, stated as plainly as I know how:
Climate Tribe Social is being built to move value in the opposite direction. Not upward to a few, but outward and downward, back to members, neighborhoods, towns, cities, villages and states.
That is what I mean by the Robin Hood of the 21st century. Let me explain what that does mean, and, just as importantly, what it does not.
Robin Hood, Without the Arrows
The old legend is about a man who took from the rich by force and gave to the poor. We are not doing that. Nobody is being robbed. Nothing is being seized. Every dollar that comes into Climate Tribe Social comes in voluntarily, through an annual subscription that a person chose to buy.
What we keep from the legend is the direction of the flow. For forty years, the dominant economic model has been a conveyor belt that carries wealth from the many to the few. Subscription platforms are usually part of that belt: millions of small payments from ordinary people, concentrated into the hands of founders, executives and investors. The members get a product. The owners get the wealth.
Climate Tribe Social is being designed to break that pattern on purpose. Members pay a modest yearly fee. After the real costs of running and growing the platform are covered, what remains is meant to go back out, to members and to the communities they live in, instead of piling up at the top.
Call it Robin Hood with a membership card instead of a longbow.
Why the Old Model Fails Us
Matthew Cooke’s “Midterms 2026 Won’t Save You” makes a point that applies directly here. Elections decide who manages the machine; they do not decide whether the machine exists. The same is true of the platforms we gather on. If the place where a community organizes is itself built to extract from that community, the community is organizing inside the very structure it is trying to change.
Most of the large social platforms we all use are free in the same way that a casino buffet is free. You pay with your attention, your data and your time, and the profits flow to people you will never meet. The structure itself is extractive. No amount of good content posted inside it changes where the money goes.
That is why I believe the platform has to be part of the solution, not just a container for conversations about solutions. The structure of the place matters as much as the words spoken inside it.
How Climate Tribe Social Is Built Differently
Here are the commitments that already shape Climate Tribe Social and its parent, Climate Change Community LLC. Some are in place. Some are in development. All of them point in the same direction.
1. A Hard Salary Cap
There is a hard cap on what anyone at the top of this organization can be paid. That includes me. A cap is the simplest guardrail against the most common way good organizations go bad: the people running them quietly start running them for themselves. When nobody can get rich from the top, the surplus has nowhere to go but out.
2. The Financial Support Program
The heart of the Robin Hood idea is what we call the Financial Support Program. Its purpose is to redistribute excess revenue, meaning what is left after real operating costs, to members and to communities. Subscriptions priced above a modest floor are what make a member eligible. The details of how, when and how much are exactly what our legal and financial advisors will help us get right, and I will not publish promises ahead of that work. But the intention is not vague, and it is not marketing. It is the reason this platform exists. Just imagine the impact of just 800 Million Subscribers for instance.
3. Prices Set to Protect the Future, Not to Get Rich
Most Spaces inside Climate Tribe Social cost between $20 and $40 a year. Several professional programs were deliberately cut from $1,000 to $20 or $89.99 when we restructured the catalogue this fall. The reason was simple: this work is about protecting our children’s future, not maximizing revenue per head. A platform that wants to return money to its members has no business overcharging them in the first place.
At the same time, a small number of higher-tier circles, such as the Creators Collective and the Cornerstone Circle, are intentionally priced for those who are able and willing to give more. That, too, is Robin Hood: those with more choosing to carry more of the load, voluntarily, so that the program can reach further.
4. Communities as Members, Not Just Individuals
This is where the idea grows from helping people to helping places.
The Civic Hearth is a Space designed for local civic institutions: town and village governments, community boards, neighborhood and tenant associations. For $20 a year, they get a room where they can learn from each other and from the wider membership about adapting to the Climate and Ecological Emergency.
Starting in 2027, the Seven Continents Collection will also open dedicated Spaces for individual towns, cities, villages and states. Each one is co-designed with the community that requests it, over a Zoom meeting, from the very beginning, so its features, imagery and content reflect that place and stay within its local laws. A village in upstate New York and a coastal town in New Jersey face different emergencies. Their Spaces should look different too.
Put those pieces together and you can see the shape of it: a network where local governments and neighborhoods are not just audiences but members, and where the surplus generated by the whole network can flow back to strengthen the places that make it up.
5. Members Calling the Shots
I deliberately call myself the Content Curator, not the owner or the founder. That is not modesty for show. Over the coming years, I want the membership to play a big part in deciding how this organization grows and where its resources go. A Robin Hood that answers to no one is just another lord of the manor. The people the program serves should have a real voice in how it serves them.
What This Looks Like on the Ground
Here is where I want this to go. These are aims, not guarantees, and I want readers to hold me to them honestly.
For members: direct financial support for members facing hardship from climate disasters, displacement, or the rising cost of simply staying where they live.
For neighborhoods: support for local resilience projects that members propose and vote on, from cooling centers to community gardens to emergency supply caches.
For towns, cities and villages: help for small local governments that lack the staff and funds to plan for floods, heat and sea level rise, starting with the knowledge, connections and planning help inside the Civic Hearth.
For Adaptive Resiliency Centers: seed support for community-powered hubs that combine disaster preparedness, trauma-informed support and AI-assisted planning, the backbone of what I call Adaptive Resiliency.
For states and regions: a growing network of local Spaces that can share what works, so one town’s hard lesson becomes every town’s head start.
None of this will happen at full scale on day one. A platform has to be built, filled, trusted and sustained before it can give much away. But the direction is set from the start, and that is the part that matters most. Organizations that promise to share “someday, once we are big” almost never do. The commitment has to be baked into the structure before the money arrives.
Why We Are Seeking an Attorney for the Common Person
Good intentions are not enough. Any program that moves money to people and communities has to be built on solid legal ground, or it will collapse the moment it is tested. Climate Change Community is a New York limited liability company, not a charity, and that raises real questions that need real answers: how redistribution is taxed, how eligibility is defined fairly, how members are protected, how we partner with local governments, and how every dollar is accounted for in the open.
So we are actively seeking an attorney to work alongside us. Not just any attorney. We are looking for someone who knows the struggles of the common person firsthand or through years of work: the tenant facing eviction, the family that lost everything in a flood and is still fighting the insurer, the small town that cannot afford a consultant, the worker caught in the gap between paychecks.
I spent nearly fourteen years in the court system as a Tech Support Specialist, in daily conversation with judges, court officers and law and bench clerks. Those years taught me two things. First, the law can be a shield for ordinary people when the right person is holding it. Second, the right person is rarely the one with the biggest firm. It is the one who still remembers who the law is supposed to serve.
If that describes you, or someone you know, I want to hear from you. Reach out by email at contact@climatechangecommunity.com, with no links in the message, and ask for a Zoom dialogue.
What This Is Not
Because trust is everything, here is what Climate Tribe Social is not:
It is not an investment. A subscription buys membership in a community. It is not a financial product, and no one should subscribe expecting a return.
It is not a lottery or a giveaway. Support will go out according to fair, published rules once our legal and financial review is done, not by chance or by popularity.
It is not a promise of a fixed amount. What can be returned depends on what the platform earns and what it honestly costs to run. We will report both openly.
It is not a charity, yet. If the right structure for this work turns out to include a nonprofit arm, a cooperative, or something else, our attorney and accountant will help us find it. The mission stays the same whatever the legal form.
Saying these things up front protects members, and it protects the mission. A Robin Hood that over-promises is just another story people stop believing.
Back to the Bigger Picture
In the companion post, I quoted King: the whole structure must be changed. That sentence can feel paralyzing. Nobody can change the whole structure of anything alone.
But every structure is made of smaller structures, and some of them we can build ourselves. A platform. A membership. A program. A room where a village board and a tenant association and a farmworker and a schoolteacher sit at the same table. A rule that says the surplus goes back to them, and a salary cap that keeps it from going anywhere else.
Matthew Cooke’s videos describe a world where value has been drained upward for forty years. Climate Tribe Social is one small, deliberate attempt to build a channel that runs the other way. It will not fix everything. It is not supposed to. It is supposed to prove that it can be done, so that others will do it too, bigger and better than we can.
Founding member invitations are going out now. Founding and Senior status closes after the first 2,350 subscribers, and public access is planned for on or about December 21, 2026. If you want to help build something that gives back by design, this is the moment to step in, while the foundations are still being poured.
Self-preservation and collective preservation go together. That is the whole idea. Let’s build it together.
Read posts at https://climatechangecommunity.com | Request a foundng member seat at contact@climatechangecommunity – no links in the email please.
Protecting our Children & Biodiversity’s future towards a more sustainable and habitable Earth!
Compiled & Mr. Alvarez’s Thoughts | AI Enhanced.
AI is used as a tool to enhance my creativity and thinking. The ideas, convictions and responsibility for this post remain my own.
Sources & Viewing
Matthew Cooke, “Zionism Is Racism. UK’s Green Party Just Voted.” YouTube: youtu.be/sDDBwr1nkeo
Matthew Cooke, “Midterms 2026 Won’t Save You.” YouTube: youtu.be/M6oO-Bvcjaw
Matthew Cooke, “France Protests Are a Western Spring. America Is Next.” YouTube: youtu.be/yXKlGZ-WhXA
Full plan referenced by Cooke: survivorsguidetoearth.com
Reporting on the Green Party vote: Al Jazeera, Times of Israel, ITV News, Reuters (October 4–5, 2026)
Reporting on the French protests: Reuters, AP, AFP (October 17–18, 2026)
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism (1967)
