It is a true honor and a privilege for me to be speaking here at this extraordinary and historic Riverside Church.

This, as many of you know, is the church that Nelson Mandela came to visit as a free man, just five months after he was released from prison, having served 27 years. He came here to thank the people of the United States for standing up for justice against the evils of apartheid in South Africa.

The courage and historic life of Mr. Mandela inspired millions and millions of people all over the world. His life and legacy will never be forgotten. 

As I think all of you also know, in 1967, at this very same pulpit that I am honored to be speaking from tonight, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made clear his vigorous opposition to the War in Vietnam—a war that was based on lies. A war of horrific destruction for the people of Asia, and for 59,000 young Americans who went abroad and never came home.

In his remarks, with extraordinary courage, Dr. King exposed what he very eloquently called “the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism.”

He warned us that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Current Issue

October 2026 Issue

What Dr. King said was true nearly 60 years ago, and it is even truer today, as our country, the United States of America, is now spending over $1 trillion a year on the military while some 800,000 Americans are homeless, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and millions of people cannot afford the basic necessities of life. 

This business of spending more and more on the military and turning backs on working families and the poor is not just happening, tragically, here in the United States—it’s happening all over the world, where we are seeing increased military budgets while the needs of people living in desperation are ignored.

So not just in the United States, but all over the world, we are moving in the wrong direction, and our job is to turn that around.

Instead of producing more bombs and weapons and seeing the military-industrial complex enjoy huge profits, governments throughout the world need to come together to feed the children, take care of the vulnerable and protect our planet from the ravages of climate change.

That is why we must continue and accelerate our efforts to end President Trump’s disastrous war in Iran which is now spreading throughout the region.

That is why we must continue to speak out against the extremist government in Israel and the genocide they have committed in Gaza, and why we in the United States must end all military aid to the Netanyahu government.

That is why we must rally and work with grassroots activists in Russia to put an end to Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine—which has led to the deaths of some 500,000 Russian soldiers, as well as mass destruction and loss of life in Ukraine.

And that is why we must denounce the United Arab Emirates’ continued financial and military support of the RSF as it wages a campaign of genocide and destruction in Sudan’s civil war.

Last week, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, correctly named three existential threats that the world currently faces. He talked about runaway artificial intelligence, he talked about the climate crisis, and he talked about deepening inequality. 

In my view, he is absolutely right.

But before we get into those issues, let me once again state the obvious, and that is that in a world of growing tension, growing militarism, more and more hatred, more and more destruction, the United Nations, as an institution, is more important today than it has ever been.

As we all know, the UN was born out of the horrors of World War II—a war in which 60 million people died, a war which caused unimaginable destruction in Europe and Asia and elsewhere, and a war that led to the unleashing of the first nuclear weapons.

To their credit, the leaders of the world at that time looked around them and saw the concentration camps, saw the destruction, saw the mass death, and they understood that international conflicts and differences of opinion must be fought out over a negotiating table and not a battlefield. 

In the year 2026, one might have hoped that after thousands and thousands of years of war, humanity could have come up with a better way to resolve conflicts than killing each other and never-ending wars. 

At a time when we are seeing efforts in the United States and in other countries around the world to make the claim that ‘might is right,’ our job is to strengthen the United Nations and make sure that we bring disagreements to the negotiating table and stop the killing throughout the world.

Now let me say a few words to the points that the Secretary-General so effectively articulated, and that is that we are living in an unprecedented and dangerous moment in world history and the challenges we face are enormous and existential. 

What do I mean by that?

First, and this is an issue we do not talk about enough for obvious reasons, we are moving rapidly toward an extremely dangerous global oligarchy.

Never before in human history have so few people held so much wealth and so much power.

Never before in human history have we had such enormous concentrations of ownership.

Never before have we seen such an unprecedented level of greed, arrogance and irresponsibility on the part of the ruling class.

In many ways, we are seeing today a reversion back to the ideology of 19th Century monarchs—kings and queens and czars—who believed, sincerely believed, that God gave them the right to rule. 

The oligarchs of today, worth hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, having investments all over the world, fervently believe that they are the masters of the universe, and that they—through their enormous wealth and power—have been ordained to rule the world. 

Today we say to those oligarchs: This country, this world, belongs to all of us, not just you. 

Today’s billionaire class not only wants more tax breaks for themselves and the companies they own. Not only do they want to stash trillions and trillions of their dollars in offshore tax havens. These oligarchs reject any form of accountability or checks on their power. They want more and more wealth and more and more power—no matter what kind of harm they inflict on working people in our country and throughout the world.

And one of the other issues we don’t talk about very much is that in nation after nation, throughout this world, we are seeing unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality. 

In our own country, here in the United States, the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 94%.

And one man, Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive, now owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households. One man.

In America today, CEOs of large, profitable corporations are earning 350 times more than the average worker.

Last year alone, after receiving the largest tax break in history, fewer than a thousand billionaires in our country became $1.5 trillion richer.

But it is not just what is happening right now—this is not a new development. Over the last 50 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $79 trillion in U.S. wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

Despite an explosion in technology and a huge increase in worker productivity, the average American worker is making nearly $25 a week less than he or she did over 53 years ago after adjusting for inflation.

While the billionaire class and the 1% have never had it so good, over 60% of Americans in the richest country in the history of the world are living paycheck to paycheck, nearly 800,000 are homeless, and tens of millions struggle to pay for rent or the mortgage or to keep a roof over their heads.

Let us be very clear. The rapid movement to oligarchy and the exponential rise in income and wealth inequality is not just an American phenomenon. It is taking place all over the world, and in my view, is the most important economic reality of our times.

In country after country, what we are seeing is working people sick and tired of seeing the very rich get richer while they struggle to put food on the table and pay for basic necessities.

They worry not only for themselves, here in America and around the world, they worry that their kids will likely have, if we don’t change it, a lower standard of living than they do.

This climate—of the rich getting richer, of working people in our country struggling, of people sleeping out on the streets, of people worrying about the future for their kids—is the reality that demagogues, whether in the United States or any place else, are feeding on.

Instead of addressing the root causes of the economic crises that working people face, the demagogues are turning to the old, time-tested, hateful ideologies of racism, anti-immigrant bigotry and xenophobia. They are pitting working people against each other based on the color of their skin, where they were born or their religion.

In doing that, they know exactly what their goal is. And that is to deflect attention away from the greed and power of the oligarchs who are causing the massive economic pain that we are seeing.

That is their goal. Nothing new. Trump didn’t invent it. Demagogues in Europe didn’t invent it. It’s gone on for a very long time.

When people are hurting, you say, ‘Hey, it’s Black people, it’s gay people, it is immigrants.’ And that’s what demagogues are doing. And our job is to take that ideology on. 

Some of us are working real hard here in the United States to do that. 

And to bring our people together and take on those who are trying to divide us up.

Unbelievably, today, according to Oxfam and other researchers, we are living in a world where the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 95% of humanity, and the gap between the very, very rich, globally, is getting wider and wider.

Just a few examples:

We are seeing it in the United Kingdom, where over 30% of children are living in poverty while 50 billionaires in that country now own more wealth than the bottom 50% of their population.

Listen to this. The latest figures that we have seen indicate that the wealthiest 500 people—half the number of people in this church tonight, control more wealth than the bottom 99.8% of their people.

We’re seeing it in Africa, where nearly 850 million people have struggled with food insecurity—58% of the population—while just four men own more wealth than the bottom 50% of people on that continent. 

We are seeing that all over the world.

In fact, while nearly half of the world’s population is living in poverty, 3,400 billionaires throughout the globe became $4 trillion richer last year alone.

Children die of preventable diseases. People suffer every day. People give up hope. And 3,400 of the richest people on Earth became $4 trillion richer last year alone. 

Let me be clear. In an increasingly globalized economy, the allegiances of these oligarchs are not to their own nations. It is to their own power. It is to their own bank accounts. It is to their huge yachts, their mansions, their collections of fancy cars, their private islands and their fleet of jets. 

The result: oligarchy is ascending, working families are struggling to stay alive, and democracy is in retreat. The great challenge that we face in our country and all over the world is that that trend must be reversed.

And my friends, given all the advances—extraordinary advances—that we have seen in technology and increases we have seen in worker productivity, it is not today a utopian idea to say that every man, woman, and child on this planet can have a decent standard of living. 

That is not just a dream. That is a reality that can happen if we put our shoulders to the wheel and demand that that happens.

When we talk about oligarchy, it is not just massive income and wealth inequality. It is about the maldistribution of economic and political power.

Unbelievably, right here in the United States, just four Wall Street firms are the major shareholders in over 95% of S&P 500 companies.

And when we talk about this massive concentration of ownership, please do not forget the media.

Who owns the media? Over half of the world’s largest media companies are now owned by billionaires.

Nine out of the top ten social media companies in the world are owned by billionaires.

And in our country, six large media conglomerates control 90% of what the American people see, hear and read.

Mr. Musk owns Twitter. Mr. Bezos owns The Washington Post and Twitch. Mr. Zuckerberg owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads.

But it is not just income and wealth inequality and concentration of ownership that we are seeing today.

Literally today, billionaires are determined to own our political system as well.

In the United States, as a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, billionaires and corporations are legally able to spend as much as they want on political campaigns through their super PACs. And that, my friends, is exactly what they are doing right at this moment.

In the last presidential election, Mr. Musk spent at least $290 million to elect Trump as president, and now he’s spending some $200 million more to help Republicans keep control over the Congress. And it is not just Republican billionaires. Democratic billionaires are also playing an important role.

But this is not just an American phenomenon.

In Germany, Musk has thrown his support behind the AfD, a party Germany’s own domestic intelligence agency has labeled a right-wing extremist party.

In Britain, two crypto billionaires, one of whom was convicted in the United States for money laundering before being pardoned by Donald Trump, gave Nigel Farage’s Reform Party 36 million pounds each.

Across Europe, as the oligarchs fund right-wing political forces while working families struggle, the social democratic parties that once built the strongest middle classes in the history of the world are losing ground as workers turn to right-wing parties.

And that is true, of course, not only in Europe—it is true right here in the United States as well.

A profound lesson must be learned from all of that. And that is that the same old establishment politics and establishment policies are no longer good enough.

People are sick and tired of the status quo. People want change.

That change, in my view, will either come from right-wing demagogues or from political parties that embrace a grassroots movement that fights for a working class agenda.

And I am really happy to tell you that right here in this city we have seen what a strong grassroots movement can do in electing a progressive mayor.

We are seeing that phenomenon from coast to coast, as candidates—often people in their twenties or thirties, people who have never run for office, people who are often women or people of color—take on the establishment candidates, they are outspent, and they are winning elections.

But it’s not just oligarchy that we’ve got to worry about. As the UN Secretary-General reminded us, there’s another issue that we must confront.

In my view, artificial intelligence, AI, and robotics are the most transformational technologies in the history of humanity. They have the potential to eliminate tens of millions of jobs. AI threatens the privacy of virtually every person in the world through mass surveillance—every phone call you make, every website you visit, every email that you send, somebody will know it.

It’s not only economic disruption, not only an invasion of our privacy, we’re also seeing a real challenge to whether or not democracy can survive when you have things like deepfakes that are so sophisticated on the internet that none of us will be able to tell truth from fiction.

Let’s be clear: What we are seeing from AI right now—and this is maybe the most important point on that subject I will make—what we are seeing from AI right now is the least capable form that this technology will ever be. 

Tomorrow and the next day and the next year, AI will be much, much more powerful.

It is advancing exponentially, every single day. In under four years, we have gone from AI that could barely write a coherent tweet to AI systems that have already escaped the control of the companies that built them.

Take a deep breath and ask yourself, where will AI be in two years, in four years, in ten years?

Will human beings be able to control this exploding technology?

So let me make a radical suggestion: if the lives of every man, woman and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of our country and the people of this world must make the decisions regarding AI, not just a handful of Big Tech oligarchs.

That is why I hope very much that when President Trump and President Xi meet on Thursday, they will sit down and begin the process of negotiating a comprehensive treaty to establish a pause on advanced AI and a ban on AI superintelligence. 

Lastly, there is another issue that I do not have to spend much time on because I suspect every person in this room knows about it, and that is the existential threat of climate change.

Last month was the hottest August ever recorded on this planet. Global ocean temperatures hit their highest level ever measured. A glacier collapsed in Nepal less than a month ago and triggered floods that have killed nearly 1,500 people. Thousands are still missing.

As the world becomes warmer, as we see more heat waves, drought, floods, forest fires, and extreme weather disturbances, we once again confront the incredible greed of the corporate world.

Unbelievably—and it really is unbelievable that these folks are literally willing to sacrifice the well-being of their own children, their grandchildren, future generations—for short-term profits for the fossil fuel industry. 

That is something I just don’t understand. I just don’t understand how people can be so short-sighted, so excited that they’re making huge profits, that they’re willing to sacrifice their own kids and grandchildren. 

In my view, our job must be not only to combat climate change and dramatically cut carbon emissions, but to seize the opportunity of creating millions and millions of jobs around the world as we move to energy efficiency and sustainable forms of energy.

Let me simply conclude by saying this: We are taking on, every day, unprecedented wealth, unprecedented power, unprecedented greed, people who truly believe that because they’re rich and smart and created lots of money, that they have the power to rule.

That’s what they believe. They use their money, through their ownership of the media, to influence public opinion. They use their money to buy elections and undermine democracy.

If there was ever a time in human history, in our country and throughout the world, that we have got to come together to create a world not based on greed, but based on justice, based on decency, now is the time.

What I can tell you, as someone who has had the privilege to be in every single state in the United States of America, to have talked to, God knows, how many thousands and thousands of people—what I’m talking about is not a left-wing idea, it is not a right-wing idea—there are people all over the country who are looking around and they’re saying, ‘This ain’t working. It is not working for me, and it is not working for our kids.’

This is the moment we have to make sure that despair and depression do not win the day.

We’ve got to stand up, we’ve got to fight back, we’ve got to create the kind of nation and world that you and I know we can create.