Bad Faith

Associate professor of economics and author of new book, The Case for Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defense of Affordability, Dignity, and Democracy Isabella Weber, returns to Bad Faith to make the case for what an anti-fascist economic program looks like, and weigh in on whether Democrats new interest in "affordability" is a meaningful step in the right direction. What specific policies are indicia of a sincerely left populist agenda as opposed to "abundance" chicanery, and what litmus tests should the left use to assess 2028 candidates?

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Founder of independent media outlet, The Lever, and former speech writer for Bernie 2020, David Sirota, returns to Bad Faith to weigh in on Mayor Mamdani's commitment to retaining Zionist billionaire Jessica Tisch as police commissioner despite calls from the DSA to fire her and disband the NYPD's notoriously violent Strategic Response Group (SRG). He also weighs in on Abdul El-Sayed's defense of campaigning with Kamala & Obama, and whether his reasoning differs from Kamala Harris's justification for campaigning with Liz Cheney. But first, Sirota breaks down his public dispute with the "never Trumper" crew over at The Bulwark, & debates the...

After being targeted by a congressional investigation headed by House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Smith, journalists from independent left media outlet BreakThrough News join Bad Faith to discuss the subpoena and deposition requests against them, the targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar by the Trump administration, and broader attacks against left media. Also, more on Zohran Mamdani's retention of Zionist billionaire police commissioner Jessica Tisch, and the hubris of working within the corporate Zionist democratic party.

Link to petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-congress-stop-the-attacks-on-breakthrough-news-journalists/

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British journalist, Washington D.C. editor of Harper's Magazine and author of several books including, most recently, Washington is Burning: Corruption & Lies in the Age of Trump, returns to Bad Faith to talk about Democratic Party efforts to rehabilitate members of the establishment whose hands were made dirty by the Gaza genocide, and what lessons the veteran reporter learned from past cover ups to help us gain accountability this time around. Are Dems really going to make Rahm Emmanuel happen?

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On the 3rd anniversary of the start of the Gaza genocide, preeminent Gaza scholar Normal Finkelstein returns to Bad Faith podcast to discuss the co-option of the pro-Palestine movement, betrayals by NY Mayor Zohran Mamdani, & engage and debate the value of the UK Green Party resolution to define Zionism as racism.

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Human rights activist, director of the Black Alliance for Peace North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, and Green Party 2020 VP candidate Ajamu Baraka returns to Bad Faith to discuss Mamdani's controversial new anti-Semitism funding, his characterization of socialism on the Theo Vonn podcast, & Abdul El-Sayed's defense of capitalism on Higher Learning. Are these left electeds helping the movement by normalizing left politics, or are they evidence of how the left is being co-opted before our very eyes? Also, at what point is the left going to be able to articulate a vision for change as coherent as...

Writer, pundit, & host of the Left Hook podcast Wajahat Ali joins Bad Faith to weigh in on Abdul El-Sayed campaigning with Kamala Harris, Mamdani's capitulations to the Zionist establishment, and whether the left is pulling the center left or whether they're slowly getting absorbed and disciplined. Hot off an interview with Joy Reid in which she disavows vote blue no matter who, Ali and Gray discuss whether that commitment will hold in the context of a 2028 general election when a "greater evil" is on the ballot. Finally, the two dig into the central premise of the harm reduction argument...

Philosopher & intellectual historian Émile Torres returns to Bad Faith to weigh in on the intellectual and cultural movement that motivates the big tech billionaires who are threatening to end the world with artificial intelligence. What is transhumanism, what do these CEOs really mean by "human extinction," what does the future look like once the brains are uploaded to the cloud, and if and when that happens, what will it mean to be alive?

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On the heels of the Paramount/Warner Brothers takeover which while result a media behemoth owned by the Zionist Ellison family, former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya returns to Bad Faith to explain the role Gavin Newsom, Rob Bonta, and other west coast Democrats played in undermining a lawsuit brought by 12 state attorneys general to block the merger. He also weighs in on the AI doomerist scuttlebutt of the last few weeks, and explains why he believes the big tech handwringing was about a desire for favorable regulatory conditions -- not stopping the robot take over of humanity.

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One of Briahna's favorite sparring partners, Princeton professor, primetime pundit, and author of several books including, most recently, America, U.S.A. How Race Shadows The Nation's Anniversaries, returns to Bad Faith to offer a broader historical context for the ongoing debate around "woke 1" and defund the police. Is "defund" the left's "Sister Souljah moment" through which it proves its 'seriousness' to the liberal establishment? If so, what is there to be gained by doing so...

Yemini-American Michigan State professor Shireen Al-Adeimi joins Bad Faith to explain how the July attack on Yemen's Sanaa international airport prompted a response from Ansar Allah that has resulted in Houthi control of Yemen's coastline including the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. How have Yeminis managed to be so successful despite the extreme poverty brought on by the years long blockade and constant bombing supported by four consecutive American administrations? Shireen provides broader historical context for the conflict, and opines on the inadequate support for Yeminis from the American elected left.

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Author of Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us joins Bad Faith to weigh in on Anthropic whistleblower Jacob Coxon's viral tweet warning that AI could lead to the end of humanity within the next decade. Is this false alarmism or a real threat? Is the threat real but exaggerated for the purpose of securing favorable anti-trust policies for AI leaders? What about tech writers like Cory Doctorow who have warned that tales of artificial intelligence advancement have been grossly overstated? And how would AI actually cause the "end of humanity" anyway?

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The Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal returns to Bad Faith to discuss the Laura Loomer-backed attack on his freedom of speech following his return from an Iran reporting trip, liberal Democrats weaponizing the specter of anti-Black racism to fracture Black & Palestinian solidarity (e.g. Hakeem Jeffries & AIPAC monkey-gate), & the new bombshell reporting out of Haaretz that Netanyahu was warned about October 7th and chose not to tell anyone. Does the new reporting indicate that Netanyahu wanted 10/7 to happen so that he had a pretext to genocide Gaza? Or is that an overly simplistic reading? Does the reporting provide opportunities for...

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Palestinian-American journalist Sam Husseini is known for his press conference confrontations and willingness to hold power to account. He recently went viral for confronting Chuck Schumer at an anti-corruption event over Israel's genocide in Gaza, and during the Biden administration, suffered injuries after being hauled out of a State Department briefing where he confronted Antony Blinken. Now, as DSA candidates win elections and quickly distance themselves from the DSA platform, the independent journalist has announced his campaign to run as a Green Party candidate in Maryland's 4th Congressional District. He...

Historian & journalist Esha Krishnaswamy returns to Bad Faith to apply a historical lens to the Jacobin-left's argument that the left needs to moderate in order to become more palatable to normie audiences. Applying lessons from the Bolsheviks and other actually-existing-socialist states, Esha argues that the role of leftists in the imperial core is heighten the contradictions of capital and support imperialist struggles -- not to sacrifice that support in the hope of gaining acceptance by zionist corporate elites. What do we make of elected leftists who can't clearly answer a question about whether Netanyahu should be arrested, or say...

Organizer, writer, political commentator and Philly DSA member James Ray joins Bad Faith to help us understand camps and factions within the DSA as they fight to determine the direction the organization takes following it's successful primary season. As the Atlanta DSA launches a "Run AOC" campaign & Jacobin Magazine publishes reformist manifestos, James Ray represents the left flank of the DSA and one of it's more left-leaning chapters. On using leverage, leaving the Democratic Party, the incongruity of being pro-Palestine and supporting Hakeem Jeffries, & the mystifying reformism of much of the American left.  

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Marxist historian, journalist, and political commentator weighs in on the recent controversy surrounding a letter, published in The Guardian and signed by a number of respected leftists including Angela Davis & Mumia Abu-Jamal. The letter drew criticism for drawing false equivalence between US empire and Iran as Iran resists the US war of aggression. Now, several signatories have disclaimed the letter, saying they misled about it's final contents before they signed, but others, including Davis, have not. To what extent is this letter evidence of an effort to create a permission structure to break solidarity with Iran? Does existence of...

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One of Briahna's favorite sparring partners, Princeton professor, primetime pundit, and author of several books including, most recently, America, U.S.A. How Race Shadows The Nation's Anniversaries, returns to Bad Faith to offer a broader historical context for the ongoing debate around "woke 1" and defund the police. Is "defund" the left's "Sister Souljah moment" through which it proves its 'seriousness' to the liberal establishment? If so, what is there to be gained by doing so? Also, was Briahna...

Co-author of Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible State craft joins Bad Faith to not only unpack the history of the Israel lobby and the roots of its enormous influence, but to diagnose how the lobby is evolving to respond to the fact that it has become a liability for politicians who receive its support. How does Clifton explain Zohran & AOC's commitment to AIPAC's biggest recipients, like Hakeem Jeffries? Why does Bernie, who takes no AIPAC money, frequently narrow his criticism to "Netanyahu?" Can following the money...

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Palestinian-American journalist Sam Husseini is known for his press conference confrontations and willingness to hold power to account. He recently went viral for confronting Chuck Schumer at an anti-corruption event over Israel's genocide in Gaza, and during the Biden administration, suffered injuries after being hauled out of a State Department briefing where he confronted Antony Blinken. Now, as DSA candidates win elections and quickly distance themselves from the DSA platform, the...

Prolific video essayist FD Signifier returns to Bad Faith Pod for a comprehensive analysis of the controversy surrounding left electeds' abandonment of 2020 era policy commitments and principles coined "Woke 1" by New York City Council member Chi Ossé, and made viral by AOC on the Sunday news last weekend. While members of the Platner left have argued that rejecting "woke one" simply means abandoning the excesses of cancel culture and identitarian jargon like "Latinx," several DSA candidates or electeds, from Francesca Hong and William Lawrence to AOC and Zohran Mamdani himself, have explicitly rejected firm BLM-era policy commitments like defund t...

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Dr. Trita Parsi, Executive VP of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author behind the Trita Parsi Substack, returns to Bad Faith to provide an update on Israel's aggression in Iran, Gaza, & Lebanon. Importantly, he offers some perspective on how US/Israeli aggression is being normalized, US funding is being invisibalized, and what demands the left should make to ensure that Gaza isn't abandoned in the p...

FL-25 Congressional candidate Oliver Larkin has been going viral over the past week for his exceptional skill at parrying bad faith corporate media questions about the DSA platform without throwing his principles under the bus. But when he's not shutting down Fox news interviews by pivoting to MAGA's Epstein-affiliated leader, he's fighting to win Debbie Wasserman Schutlz's old district and join the House as a committed DSAer. Unlike Michigan's Will Lawrence, who has immediately distanced himself from DSA post-win, saying his membership has "lapsed" while pledging to vote for Hakeem Jefferies as speaker, Larkin says he'll defend the platform...

As progressives candidates have made electoral gains across the country over the past few weeks, Democrats are once again attempting to discredit the left by pointing to a poor showing with Black voters. For example, attempts have been made to ding Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed with this charge, even as polls show Black voters prefer him to his opponent, and the old "Bernie Bro" smear has even been trotted back out by Maine's Susan Collins . Jim Clyburn went viral for insinuating that Black electeds are justified in selling out because it's harder to fundraise from disproportionately low income Black voter...

DSA co-chair Maggie Romer joins Bad Faith in the wake of her viral Fox News appearance in which she was asked about DSA platform planks like abolishing the Senate, abolishing ICE, defunding the Pentagon, and prison abolition. Predictably, the right wing dragged the clip, but so did many on the "socialist left" who are, apparently, ashamed of the DSA platform voted on by its members. I ask Romer the questions I had for fellow DSAer Dan Denvir: What are the goals of the DSA, and are those goals frustrated by a slate of electeds who frequently put distance between...

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Associate Professor of Political Economy & UK Green Party advocate Ashok Kumar joins Bad Faith to explain the successes of UK Greens, and weigh in on the insurgent DSA left and whether it hurts or helps the prospect of an independent left party. He weighs in on Mamdani's viral video explaining why he can't arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, DSA-left consolidation around AOC 2028, AOC's response to establishment red...

Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University & author of Black Scare Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, Charisse Burden-Stelly, returns to Bad Faith to discuss the new 100 page State Department report accusing American leftist groups of being part of a "sustained campaign of subversion" against the United States. This new Red-Scare blacklist names Code Pink, the DSA, Hasan Piker, Ben Cohen, Zohran Mamdani, and even Maxine Waters. What does this mean for left movements, & does the liberal response to these accusations, which is largely to distance "Communism" from Scandinavian-style social democracy, help or...

Comedian, actor, and musician Amanda Seales returns to Bad Faith to talk about her new album and the value of revolutionary music, Jay Z's controversial freestyle about Colin Kaepernick, Graham Platner fall-out and the left's unsettled racial politics, & the state of love on the left.

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Senior editor at Playboy, Magdalene J. Taylor, returns to Bad Faith to discuss her viral (and somewhat infamous) New York Times essay, "There's Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men." Responding to a trend toward "hetero-pessimism," or a cynical feeling that heterosexual relationships are beyond repair due largely to something 'wrong' with men, she offers a counter argument: There's never been a better time to be straight. Reasonable minds can disagree. You can read her opinion piece here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/opinion/heteropessimism-straight-dating-love.html

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Legendary drag queen, comedian, & DJ featured in Sex and the City, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar, & RuPaul's Drag Race, is the rare pop-culture maven willing to be loud and proud about her left-politics in the entertainment world. She weighs in on recent left wins and the future of left politics, the state of identity politics -- specifically as they play out in the LGBTQ community, her upbringing & path to left politics, and more.

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Former socialist Seattle city council woman Kshama Sawant returns to Bad Faith podcast to break down the fall out from the latest Graham Platner scandal and how the establishment-left media that made him is responding. Should they have supported him in the first place given his unrepentant enthusiasm for war? Did left media figures abandon their responsibility to vet his anti-imperial bonafides? If they had, could they have avoided the embarrassment of defending a man who once said he'd rape a home intruder to demonstrate dominance?

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Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, founder of The Intercept, and host of System Update, Glenn Greenwald, returns to Bad Faith to discuss the likelihood that Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other disaffected, America-first conservatives are planning to break from the Republican Party to start a new, anti-war third party. Will Tucker do what entryist left orgs like DSA has refused to try? Will he successfully capture the plurality of voters who do want an anti-war party? Would Tuc...

Host of The Dig podcast, Daniel Denvir, joins Bad Faith to discuss the DSA sweep and whether the new elected socialist candidates might be willing to act as a block to change the Democratic Party before the Democratic Party changes them. Is DSA wrong to refuse to act as a party, or to support candidates running outside of the Democratic Party, like Andre Easton? What is the strategy there? And if the DSA refuses to take party building seriously, will the Tucker Carlson right be first to harness imperialist, working class energy to achieve a third party break from...

Independent researcher Tonery Rose & political scientist & host of The American Exception Podcast, Aaron Good, return to Bad Faith to breakdown the story behind Peter Thiel's secret society, Dialog, and the various "conspiracies" that help to fill in the gaps in mainstream realpolitik analysis. But before I ask them to run through their favorite conspiracy theories, we run through the establishment meltdown over the Mamdani-slate's victory last week in New York from the ladies of The View, to James Carville.

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Author of We Were Never Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, and professor in the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University, joins Bad Faith to discuss his historical review of the history of "wokeness," why it cyclically emerges and declines over the decades, and the dangers the "symbolic capitalism" class present to the pursuit of economic equality. Though there's much agreement on the pernicious effects of woke identity politics, we debate our different theories of who is responsible for "woke," and assess whether Tuesday's big DSA wins in New York herald the end of the establishment's...

As an abolitionist professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and member of Zohran Mamdani's transition team advising on community safety, Alex Vitale is the perfect guest to help us understand some concerning choices Mamdani has made with respect to policing since becoming Mayor of New York City. In addition to the mystery of why he kept on billionaire zionist police commissioner Jessica Tisch, Mamdani is now being questioned over his choice to violate his campaign promise not to expand the police force. Earlier this month, Tisch announced that the NYPD would be hiring 580 more officers -- a choice met...

Short-form socialism-explainer Chris Alfonso, aka Jean-Paul Fartre, returns to Bad Faith pod to noodle on the nature of US empire and answer a question recently presented in a conversation between NYT podcaster Ezra Klein & Bernie foreign policy advisor Matt Duss: Is the left's goal a left nationalism or a left internationalism? What does left internationalism mean if raising workers' standards of living is the sine qua non of left advocacy, but doing so sometimes comes at the expense of the global south? But first: The Knicks win, and why JLo's controversial Subway Takes take is right. Also, we weigh...

Philosopher and author of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, Gabriel Rockhill, returns to Bad Faith to expand on his criticism of the "compatible left" -- a type of reformist leftist who is elevated by the establishment due to their unwillingness to support actually existing socialism. A recent hit piece on Chris Smalls in Jacobin, unqualified support for mercenary Graham Platner -- how does Rockhill interpret what's going on with the establishment left, and what does he make of the right's leadership on criticism of Palestine? Is Tucker's "America First" politics fundamentally incompatible with imperialism?

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A few weeks ago, we had an all star panel to discuss AI data centers and the pivot in both liberal and left publications away from embracing climate change as an issue. One of those articles was written in the New York Times by Syracuse professor Matt Huber, who teachers in the geography and environment department. Today, Huber joins the podcast with AI panelist Aaron Reguberg to push back on how his argument was characterized, and to defend his take that Democrats don't have to campaign on climate change anymore because they can win by prioritizing economic issues. Are...

Executive director of the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, returns to Bad Faith to break down the latest attempt by Zionists to push the "mass rape" narrative that has greased the runway for Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, but stays to debate the role Tucker Carlson should play in advancing the lefts anti war and anti imperialist aims. A fascinating exploration of ethnics, media, and progressive values with one of the left's best journalists.

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