# Hollywood, Soft Power & Ireland’s Anti-American Left?

An episode of [The David McWilliams Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1462649946), 18 Nov 2025, 48 min.

Audio: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/acast/s/the-david-mcwilliams-podcast/e/691b3f247b9e972a6bb8afda/media.mp3

Reporting from West Hollywood, in a rock ’n’ roll hotel with no parties and no drugs as house rules. We take a walk down Sunset Boulevard and into the strange engine of L.A.: a city built almost entirely on imagination, storytelling and constant reinvention. From Mulholland’s aqueduct to the studios that wrote America’s myths, we asks: what does a place like this tell us about capitalism, churn and the Uber-ised, gigged-out modern economy? From there, we fly back into something touchier: Ireland’s relationship with the United States. We lay out just how dependent Ireland is on U.S. investment, jobs and tax, and then ask why so much of the Irish left, especially what he calls the “presidential left”, is reflexively anti-American. We unpack third-worldism, neutrality as moral performance, climate politics as a Trojan horse, and the growing gap between Áras rhetoric and how ordinary Irish people actually live, work and travel in a world where America is still our best friend Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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