Who are the waste people?

In our debut episode of We the Waste People, two Southern metalheads — a Gen X’er and an elder millennial — kick things off with a rapid-fire Q&A to size up each other’s leftist politics and let you in on where we're coming from. We launch our Class Discussion series with Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, the book that inspired our podcast’s name and unpacks the deep roots of America’s class system—showing why working-class whites deserve a better political home than MAGA. Then, in Lifestyles of the Looting Class, we drag billionaire Peter Thiel into the spotlight — exposing how his empire fuels mass surveillance, authoritarian politics, and the unholy marriage of Big Tech and the security state.