On Wednesday evening, the California-based Punch Up Pod, interviewed Socialist Equality Party (US) candidates for president and vice president, Joseph Kishore and Jerry White.

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The Punch Up Pod is a weekly online political and entertainment program hosted by Leila Charles Leigh and Patrick Cote. In the midst of last year’s historic dual writers’ and actors’ strike, Leigh, an actress on strike at the time, and Cote interviewed World Socialist Web Site Arts Editor David Walsh.

In Wednesday’s interview, Kishore explained that the purpose of the SEP’s campaign was to fight to develop “an understanding in the working class that all the problems that workers confront...the expanding war...the growth of dictatorship, fascism, capitalist exploitation, the pandemic, climate change, all these are expressions of capitalism, and the solution to the problems confronts the working class is socialism.”

White added, “The capitalist two-party system in the United States excludes the broad masses of working people.

“We have a situation where you have Biden, who is an out and out warmonger, the supporter of the genocide, a supporter of reckless confrontation with Russia and China. And then you have a would-be dictator who is exploiting that social discontent over economic distress in order to channel it into anti-immigrant hysteria and anti-communism.

“We are seeking through our campaign to appeal to the working class, which is increasingly entering political life and becoming radicalized, to offer a political program based on internationalism and socialism.”

Expounding on the centrality of internationalism in the struggle for socialism, White said, “All the problems, whether it’s the pandemic, whether it’s the environment, whether it’s war, whether it’s inflation, these are global problems.”

The conversation detailed many critical political issues, including the genocide in Gaza, the US-NATO war against Russia, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growth of the class struggle.

Wednesday’s full interview is available to watch on on the Punch Up Pod YouTube channel or through the Punch Up Pod account on X/Twitter.