The Real News Podcast

President Trump has renewed his efforts to “Build the Wall” in areas along the US-Mexico Border that don’t currently have border barriers—including the Big Bend region of West Texas. Invading people’s private properties and upending their local economies and shared ecosystem with a border wall residents say they don’t want or need, the Trump administration continues to doll out billions of taxpayer dollars to flood Texas border towns like Terlingua, Sanderson, and Marfa with troops and federal agents—and to pay construction contractors with ties to the Trump family.

In this episode of Working People, we spe...

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa interviews archivist, photographer, and veteran Black Panther Party member Billy X Jennings.

Joining the Party at age 17 after relocating from Hobson City, Alabama, to Oakland, Jennings managed BPP offices and served as bodyguard to Huey P. Newton. During Bobby Seale’s 1973 Oakland mayoral run, Jennings helped spearhead an unprecedented electoral effort: "…an organizing event on the highest level the parties had ever been. I mean, the party is known for organizing, but to go into electoral politics and do what we did for a first time basis, it chan...

Because he was bullied in elementary school for being Native American, James Gardner’s friends lovingly call him “NDN.” His friends and family know NDN to be a fiercely loyal, loving person, and a fiercely hard worker. But as a third-generation concrete specialist, NDN was exposed to chemicals that have left him disabled, terminal, and facing foreclosure on his home. In this episode of Working People, we speak with James “NDN” Gardner and his best friend James Quigg.

Additional links/info:
GoFundMe: James Gardner: Terminal Liver Failure—Home at RiskMaven Navarro, Forth Worth Star-Telegram, “Terminally ill, this prou...

From the heinous crimes of the Epstein class to the Cornell 7, from the toxic cultures of the “manosphere” to the increase of antisocial relationships with online pornography and AI bots, we need to talk about what is going on with men in our society. We speak with renowned scholar, author, and commentator Dr. Mark Anthony Neal about his new book “Save a Seat for Me: Notes on American Fatherhood,” and about the ways capitalism damages everyone and trains boys to become monstrous men.

Videography: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Become a supporter of this podcast: https...

Brazil votes this Sunday, and the Trump administration has spent months trying to tilt the outcome toward far-right presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro. Tariffs. Terrorist designations. Revoked visas. Frequent meetings with the Bolsonaro family. Taken alone, each move looks random. Put the pieces together, and a picture emerges: U.S. interference in Brazil's 2026 elections. 

Over the last year, Trump has met frequently with members of the Bolsonaro family. In June, the State Department put two Brazilian gangs on the terrorist list. Just a few weeks later, Trump shared an article on Truth Social that said Brazil was his nex...

“We are living in a pivotal moment in labor history,” Cole Rockarts writes in their new book Fired Up About Unions. “At a time when corporations have more power, profit, and political influence than ever before, workers are leading inspiring union organizing campaigns and taking on bosses to win big… Their struggles reveal that everyday people can unite, change their conditions, and build better workplaces and a better world.” In this episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of labor organizers across the USA and Canada about why labor unions are more important now than ever, and how workers or...

Residents are shaken and demanding answers after ICE agents terrorized a quiet, suburban neighborhood in Frederick, Maryland, earlier this month. On September 4, federal agents swarmed the Tasker’s Chance neighborhood in West Frederick, invaded the home of one family, and eventually left without making any arrests. ICE agents were filmed beating peaceful protestors and menacingly driving their unmarked cars onto sidewalks and private property while local police officers stood by and watched. In this on-the-ground report, TRNN takes you to the very spot in Frederick where these terrifying events transpired, and we speak with an eyewitness who saw everything.

After being abducted by plainclothes ICE agents from his New York apartment building in March of 2025 and locked away in immigration jail for 104 days, Mahmoud Khalil has been freed and reunited with his family. But Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student who was heavily involved in the student-led justice for Palestine movement, is still being targeted by the Trump administration and still faces the possibility of deportation. In this exclusive interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with Khalil to speak about his new book, “No Land to Stand On,” and his continuing fight for freedom and justice.

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, the midterms edition, we take you to the Commonwealth, where Andrea James—abolitionist, author, and organizer—is currently running for governor of Massachusetts. The countdown to November 3 is officially underway. Debates are scheduled for October, but independent and third-party candidates are being excluded from participating. Andrea James has led national campaigns to reunite families by demanding clemency from high-level officials for incarcerated women and men. Now, she is running for governor with a platform focused on rent stabilization, lower energy costs, free childcare and stopping the construction of a new $360M women’s prison...

Editor’s Note: Council Bill 26-0174 (data centers) will get another public hearing in front of the Baltimore City Council’s Land Use & Transportation Committee on the 4th floor of City Hall on the morning of September 24.

Baltimore, Maryland, currently has a moratorium on new data center development, but a proposed City Council bill has residents nervous that the door is creaking open for data centers to come into the city—and that City Council views this as “inevitable.”Council Bill 26-0174, sponsored by City Councilmember Phylicia Porter, would require new data center projects in Baltimore to go through a...

On the morning of August 18, residents living near the Brent Industries facility in Toledo, Ohio, awoke to a series of massive explosions and a towering chemical fire in their backyards. Two Brent Industry workers who were on shift at the time of the explosion were killed. Members of the surrounding community say they are experiencing symptoms of chemical exposure, and that they are not getting the answers they need from Brent Industries or the Environmental Protection Agency.

In this episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of Toledo residents about the industrial disaster at Brent Industries...

What will a DSA-led state look like — will it back defund and community control of police, or bow to the powers that block affordability? Lawrence Grandpre, political commentator for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, explores this question in his recent Baltimore Times article, "The Dangers of 'Law and Order' Leftism: Toward a Black Power Public Safety," asking whether DSA will embrace the outmoded Law and Order politics that fueled America's prison boom. As officials like AOC and Mamdani backtrack on defunding police — one of the biggest carceral drains on housing, healthcare, and education funding — Grandpre sits down with former political prison...

This is a particularly important episode, coming just two weeks ahead of the 1st round of high stakes presidential elections in Brazil.
Host Michael Fox speaks with Artur Romeu. He’s a Brazilian journalist and the Latin American Director for Latin America of the international NGO Reporters Without Borders. 
They spoke ahead of Episode 6 of The Battle for Free Speech, about Brazil’s fight against disinformation. He has an important analysis, which helps to deconstruct how Trump, Silicon Valley and the far-right in the United States, and around the world is "instrumentalizing the idea of free speech for their...

Long after his death in 2010, the books and speeches of Howard Zinn are frequently targeted by right-wing critics, MAGA book-bans, and fundamentalist politicians. In 2020, President Trump called out Zinn by name from the White House lawn, smearing Zinn’s work as “propaganda… that tries to make students ashamed of their own history.” So, who was Howard Zinn? And why are his critics so determined to keep his work from the public? In this live event, hosted at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Baltimore, Maryland, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with author and TRNN contributor Dave Zirin about his latest...

Fernando Cerimedo. A name that unless you follow Latin America closely, you likely have never heard.

He’s been called “MAGA’s man” in Latin America. And he is at the heart of a shocking scandal that includes “attempted femicide,” election rigging, fake news, disinformation and powerful political ties to far-right presidents across Latin America, and even the White House, under Donald Trump.
It’s big news in Latin America, even though it's been largely under the radar in the United States, until now.

The scandal has dire implications for the legitimacy of elections up and down the Am...

On August 27, registered nurses, patients, and community allies rallied and stopped traffic in cities around the US to demand that hospitals and elected officials cut all ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir. In this episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of registered nurses—Kelli Brennan (Portland, Maine), Lee Barker (Kansas City, Missouri), and Kiera Arbour (Chicago, Illinois)—about National Nurses United’s “Purge Palantir!” campaign, and about the disturbing creep of Big Tech and Big Brother into a US healthcare system that is already in crisis.

Additional links/info:
National Nurses Organizing Committee...

Today, host Michael Fox speaks with Mary Anne Franks.
She is a professor of Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at George Washington University and the President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. 
She is also the author of the book Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment,which was published in 2024, by Bold Type Books.
She has an incredible analysis about free speech historically and today — the challenges and how we need to try to understand free speech beyond the 1st amendment.
Michael and Mary Anne spoke last year — 2025.
This is the second...

Over the 2026 Labor Day weekend, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez spoke at the Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium in Wheeling, West Virginia, organized by the Wheeling Academy of Law & Science (WALS) Foundation. The theme of this year’s Symposium was “The Art of Labor,” and other speakers included: Tabitha Arnold, textile artist and tapestry maker; Erik Ruin, printmaker and shadow puppeteer; and Shaun Slifer, a multidisciplinary artist and the Creative Director for the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.

In this episode of Working People, we share the audio recording of Alvarez’s speech, “Why the Stories Working People Tell Ourselves About Ours...

This is the first bonus episode of The Battle for Free Speech. Today, host Michael Fox speaks with Fara Dabhoiwala. He is a professor of History at Princeton University. And he’s the author of the book, What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. 

That book was published in 2025 by Penguin Random House and Harvard University Press. His book, in many ways, challenges the status quo about our understanding of free speech.

Professor Dabhoiwala has a wealth of knowledge on the subject of free speech and he appeared throughout this podcast series. But the...

This week marks the 1-year anniversary of Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific oceans. On September 2, 2025, President Donald Trump announced the first air strike on a boat in the Caribbean. Trump said the boat allegedly carried drugs off the coast of Venezuela. It marked the beginning of a hostile U.S. foreign policy that has seen the U.S. invade Venezuela, unleash a devastating oil blockade on Cuba, and justify it all under a renewed Monroe Doctrine, which the President is calling his Donroe Doctrine.

Meanwhile, the boat strikes have continued until today, even though Tru...

The 20th-century days of vinyl records, tape decks, CDs, Tower Records, and MTV have given way to our 21st-century age of MP3s and music streaming, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, and Ticketmaster. While certain people and certain companies in the music industry are making more money than ever, working musicians are finding it increasingly impossible to pay the bills and make a living from their art. In this episode of Working People, we speak with all four members of veteran Chicago rock band The Empty Pockets about the work that goes into being a professional musician, and the realities of...

Author and community organizer Dominque Conway has transformed a house at the epicenter of the 2015 Baltimore uprising into "Eddie’s Front Porch," a people’s museum dedicated to preserving the remarkable legacy of her late husband, Eddie Conway. To mark the opening of the museum, this special episode of Rattling the Bars features host Mansa Musa sitting down with Dominque to discuss the project and Eddie's enduring impact.

The conversation also highlights perspectives from formerly incarcerated organizers who worked alongside Eddie inside Maryland prisons and are now building community power on the ground in West Baltimore. Together, they shar...

On August 8th at the Real News Studio, a screening of the new documentary Beyond the Wire—directed by filmmaker Dr. S. Rasheem—was followed by a panel discussion featuring seasoned conflict mediation organizers from the film. The participants explored their grassroots efforts to challenge the corporate media establishment’s heavy emphasis on crime—which drives city policy and the local economy—and redefine Baltimore’s historical present as a city of abolition.

Credits:
Videographer: Cameron Granadino/David HebdenEditor: Cameron Granadino

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support.

David Sirota joins Taya Graham and Stephen Janis to expose the enormous financial incentives shaping Democratic politics and why political consultants can accumulate “generational wealth” even when their candidates lose. David Sirota explains how consultants profit from massive television-ad purchases, how billionaire-funded super PACs influence the candidates and policies voters are offered, and how the language of “moderation” and “electability” is used to undermine progressive and populist challengers.

We examine the consequences of legalized political corruption: Washington’s silence on America’s healthcare crisis, the widening gulf between voters and their representatives, and the 50-year campaign to transform elections into a...

After a deadly “derecho” storm and flash floods slammed the midwest in early August, downing trees and power lines, tens of thousands of residents in and around Gary, Indiana have been surviving without power for 12 days and counting. According to the Associated Press, “Northern Indiana Public Service Co. said 68,000 customers were still without power as of Thursday morning, the majority of them in Lake County beside the Illinois border. The utility said it has restored power to 306,500 others since Aug. 11. But power is not expected to be fully restored until Tuesday [Aug. 25] in some places, including Gary.” In this urgent episode...

Today, we are pleased to share with you an episode from the podcast Scene on Radio. It’s hosted by longtime journalist John Biewen, with co-host journalism professor Chenjerai Kumanyika. It’s a series from the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and distributed by PRX.

This episode is Season 8, Episode 6, of Scene on Radio: What Could Have Been? 

Ever thought about whether America's overwhelmingly corporate, for-profit news system is working as it should? It didn't have to be this way. In the 20th century, reformers fought for a more democratic and more accou...

In her 2001 masterwork Nickel and Dimed, the late Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover to report on the daily realities working people in America face trying to get by on minimum-wage. After working as a housekeeper, a nursing aide, a home cleaner, a server, and more, Ehrenreich wrote that “The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.’” It is difficult to overstate the impact that Ehrenreich’s book and body of work have had on US culture and working-class politics over the last 25 years, and the enduring relevance of her work today. In this special ep...

Effective public safety policy is founded on preventing crime and repairing harm, but these are not the foundations of America’s reactionary criminal justice establishment. This week on Rattling the Bars, we host a roundtable discussion about the DC Justice Lab’s 2026 Public Safety Policy Agenda, which has been endorsed by 30 progressive organizations working directly with system-impacted individuals, and about criminal justice reforms that would ensure safer communities through restorative justice, not draconian punishment.Additional links/info:DC Justice Lab website, Facebook page, X page, and InstagramDC Justice Lab, 2026 DC Public Safety Policy AgendaCredits:Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino

Beco...

How are hip hop and Black Liberation connected? In this special Black August edition of Rattling the Bars, former political prisoner and Black Panther Mansa Musa sits down with artist, producer, and "Panther Cub" Mopreme Shakur on the rooftop of a hotel in the nation's capital. Together, they explore Shakur’s memoir, This Thug's Life, tracing the trajectory from the rise and fall of Black Power to the birth of hip hop through the eyes of the son of a Panther and the stepbrother of a legend.

Additional links/info:
Mopreme Shakur, Penguin Random House, Th...

In 2024, at the height of Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, one of the most widespread waves of college campus protests since the Vietnam War exploded across the United States. Then came the repressive backlash. Over the past two years, we’ve seen a harrowing assault on free speech and the right to protest from the federal government and Zionist organizations, and universities themselves have ramped up their own internal surveillance and repression machines, weaponizing them against their own students, grad students, and faculty.

Life, learning, and activism on American college campuses looks very different today than...

Frontline healthcare workers and the patients they serve are facing a major crisis at the University of Vermont Health network—the state’s leading healthcare provider. “In June, UVM Health eliminated over 140 positions across its network, a third of which were union positions,” Matt More reports at The Rake Vermont. “The cuts, which the hospital estimated will save $9.5 million, comes as the network faces a $300 million budget shortfall… Later that month, UVM Health handed down a speed-up order to its Medical Group, which includes outpatient clinics and more than 1,000 physicians, which practitioners say will result in briefer appointments with patients.”

How...

For the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum (BP) has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. The facility, located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, is BP’s last unionized oil refinery in the United States. BP says it is pursuing “modernized job structures, training, and upskilling,” but workers and their union—United Steelworkers Local 7-1—say that the company has not bargained in good faith, that its contract proposals pose blatant existential threats to workers’ jobs, pay, and collective bargaining rights, and that the company is illegally trying to crush the un...

As GOP lawmakers push “tough-on-crime” policies in Washington, D.C., re-entry advocates argue these backward measures will only increase recidivism, not prevent it.

In Part Two of our series on conservative attempts to use D.C. as a testing ground for harsh criminal justice policies, Rattling the Bars host Mansa Musa sits down with Chelsea Canterbury and Eric Franklin of Voices for a Second Chance. They discuss the danger of proposed measures—including charging 14-year-olds as adults, increasing mandatory minimums, repealing the Second Look Act, and reinstating cash bail—and explain why doubling down on mass incarceration won’t make the...

In 2022, the United States nearly experienced its first national railroad strike in decades, until then-President Joe Biden, along with Democrats and Republicans in Congress, stepped in to block a strike before it could begin. Rail labor unions were forced to accept contracts that did not substantively address long-brewing crises in the freight rail industry that have had disastrous consequences for frontline workers, trackside communities like East Palestine, Ohio, the passenger rail system, and the US supply chain writ large. In this episode of Working People, we speak with returning guest “Jay,” a veteran train dispatcher who’s been in the indust...

When workers at the historic Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper hit the picket line in October of 2022, they had no idea that they would be on strike for over three years—or that the strike would end with new owners taking over the paper and most strikers losing their jobs. But now, a new chapter is being written in their epic story. This week, workers and community supporters launched the Pittsburgh Progress, “a cooperative news organization, owned and democratically run by its workers and members… dedicated to looking out for, and telling the stories of, the working-class people who form the heart and so...

A 7-11 on Liberty Heights Avenue in Northwest Baltimore, Maryland, has become a flashpoint of community rage and resistance after Ade Oba Tokunbo (Stephen King), a 74-year-old resident, was attacked and brutally beaten there by six teenagers on July 7, 2026. The same location is also the site of multiple robberies and the murder of Victorious Swift in March of 2017. In response, “A Clarion Call,” a new coalition of local community organizations and residents, organized a rally at the 7-11 on Sunday, July 26, and led a community march into the store to demand the company implement policies that will keep customers safe and...

The outcome of Michigan’s Senate race will have major implications for the balance of power in Washington, DC, and for the future of the Democratic Party itself. With primaries taking place on August 4, all eyes are on the battle between progressive candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and establishment candidate Haley Stephens to see who will represent Democrats in the general election. In this full, unedited interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with El-Sayed to talk about his campaign, the civil war within the Democratic party, and about fighting corporate oligarchy and MAGA fascism at the same time.

C...