Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy
Expertly-curated progressive politics, news, and culture produced by leftist humans, not algorithms or AI. This is an award-winning podcast that dives deeply into a wide range of national and international issues facing society and governments. We draw from hundreds of sources of progressive news and commentary. Est. 2006. Save time by listening to a range of perspectives on a focused topic in each episode and be introduced to new sources you will not have come across on your own!
Power Play: The Women's Sports Boom Is About Power, Not Ratings
Air Date: 10/23/2026
Today we look at the women's sports boom as a power story and explain how women's sports were held back on purpose, from England banning women's soccer for fifty years to colleges spending next to nothing on their women's teams, primarily because the men feared the competition.
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TOP TAKES
KP 1: The...
The Gun Debate Is Less of a Debate Than We Think (Throwback)
Publish Date: 10/22/2026
Original Air Date: 4/6/2018
Today we look back to the spring of 2018, when a conservative listener called in looking for common ground on guns and we answered her point by point: the research on defensive gun use, who gets to be the good guy with a gun, what the Second Amendment was written to do, and the policies most Americans, gun owners included, already support. After the shooting at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon, every one of those questions is back.
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#1829 Poverty Is Hard on Purpose in America and We All Pay the Time Tax
Air Date: 10/17/2026
Today we look at how being poor in America is made harder on purpose. The hours of paperwork it takes to keep food assistance or Medicaid are there to shrink the programs quietly by attrition and make failure feel like a personal problem. The same design runs through a healthcare system that profits when care is denied and the patient doesn't have the time to fight back. The alternative is the kind of program you'd design if you thought everyone living in a wealthy society was worthy of a dignified life.
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The Cornell 7 and How Rape Culture Runs on the Men Who Don't Rape
Air Date: 10/13/2026
Today we look at rape culture as a system that contains far more than the crimes. This topic was prompted by the Cornell 7 story but it starts with little boys annoying girls and having it excused as affection, runs through the "nice guy" who treats kindness as a down payment, and ends with the false claim that men can't be expected to control their sexual urges. We're organizing the episode a little differently than normal, with the material everyone should hear in the first hour and the deeper dives being reserved for that which men...
More Reasons Than You Should Need to Oppose the Death Penalty (Throwback)
Publish Date: 10-11-2026
Original Air Date: 9-16-2014
Today we dig through the archives to give context to the news that the Pentagon plans to execute the Fort Hood shooter by firing squad, the first U.S. military execution in more than 60 years.
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Ch. 1: Death Penalty - @LastWeekTonight with John Oliver - Air Date 5-4-14
Ch. 2: Americans Back Death Penalty, Whether...
Deep Cuts: Exxon Knew - The History Behind the Case to Make Polluters Pay
Air Date: 10/7/2026
Today we trace the "Exxon Knew" story through a decade of our own archive, because that history is what the Supreme Court is weighing in Suncor v. Boulder in their first case this term. Exxon's scientists confirmed the climate science in the early eighties and the company chose to manufacture doubt. Communities like Boulder County have paid ever since and the question before the Supreme Court is whether any lawsuit like this will be allowed to go to trial.
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The Mechanics of Complicity from Nazis to Newsrooms to Fandoms
Air Date: 10/3/2026
Today we examine the mechanisms of complicity. We're not all complicit in the worst atrocities but we are complicit in something so it's good to know how it works. Good people go along with bad ideas and thoughtful people allow themselves to be thoughtless all the time. The reasons are often structural but they can be resisted on both the personal level and collectively.
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#1825 We Are Still the 99%: Occupy Wall Street's Unfinished Business, 15 Years Later
Air Date: 9/30/2026
Today we look at the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, which was in full swing 15 years ago and changed how the country talks about inequality and the 1%. In the meantime, the cumulative wealth of the 1% in the US has roughly tripled and Trump has the wealthiest cabinet in history running the country, so the concerns expressed at Occupy have only come into sharper relief.
This miniseries helped inspire today's episode, check it out!
Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising
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The Next Gilded Age: AI Doomsday and the Insatiable Business Model https://www.bestoftheleft.com/1824
Air Date: 9/26/2026
Today we explore the layers of chaos surrounding the AI industry, including the idealistic nerds-turned-nazis, the grift, bubble, and doom-marketing business model, and what people are doing to fight back.
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KP 1: Do Silicon Valley Billionaires Want to End Democracy? - Political Breakdown - Air Date 8-14-26
KP 2: The AI Bubble Is Bigger And More Dangerous Than...
Monthly-ish Mix #12 The Great American Heist
Air Date: 9/22/2026
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on the news from July and August without being overwhelming! Organized around a single idea: ask who the system is for, and every story this summer gives the same answer. The administration rewrites the national story while libraries lose their funding. Corporations fence off ideas as private property. Latin America gets treated like a portfolio and Greenland like a drilling site. Police cameras put every driver under permanent investigation. The seats it all runs from are held until death, and the fixes on the table ai...
Deep Cuts: Occupy Wall Street in Real Time, 15 Years Later
Air Date: 9/18/2026
Today we're doing something new and different but also very old. Occupy Wall Street just hit its 15th anniversary this month and we thought we'd do something that only we can, which is dip into our archives and pull out the best of the Occupy coverage we played in real time as it was happening as well as some other retrospective coverage that aired 10 years later.
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The State Media Playbook: The FCC and Billionaires Are Waging a War on the Free Press
Air Date: 9/13/2026
Today we trace the two-front war on the American press. On one side, government regulators and members of Congress are going after news outlets for the stories they choose to run. On the other, politically friendly buyers are taking ownership of major networks to turn them into free-market versions of state media.
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..TOP TAKES
KP 1: How to Build a State Media...
Election Sabotage, Voting System Vulnerabilities, and the Defense of the 2026 Midterms
Air Date: 9/9/2026
Today we look at the strategies being deployed by the Trump administration and their enablers to undermine the midterm elections and what it actually takes to fight back. The lawyers fighting in court against the efforts to destroy our democracy are clear-eyed that you cannot litigate your way to a free election. The most durable defense is a turnout margin too large to plausibly contest, and organizers are building toward it now.
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SOLVED! #39 - Why You Should Care About Prisons in the Fight for a Better World (Throwback)
Re-Air Date: 8/5/26
Original Air Date: 4/24/26
Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:
Ch. 1 - Why victims of crime are underserved and actually prefer rehabilitative, root-case approaches to justice
Ch. 2 - How cashless bail reform has shrunk jail populations and fueled momentum to block new jail construction
Ch. 3 - The local fight over a proposed mega-prison in Arkansas making some conservatives question mass incarceration itself
Ch. 4 - A think tank report that proves the glaringly obvious facts about what reduces recidivism, and an article on the community "solutionaries"...
Science and Public Health Under Attack by Our Own Government
Air Date: 9/2/2026
Today we look at how public health is being gutted by a system that took ordinary parental worry and organized, radicalized and monetized it into an anti-science "wellness" movement large enough to seize real political power.
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Coerced Sterilization, Abortion Bans, and the New Pronatalism: Who Controls American Reproduction (Transcript)
Air Date: 8/29/2026
Today we examine what happens when the state wants to decide whether a person reproduces. A century ago, American courts sanctioned the forced sterilization of women deemed unfit to reproduce. 60 years ago, a communist dictator ran a pronatalist experiment with disastrous results. Now, abortion access is collapsing and a new pronatalist movement is rising to wreak havoc.
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Flock Cameras, ICE, and the Surveillance State Targeting Everyone
Air Date: 8/25/2026
Today we explore the resistance to Flock cameras and mass surveillance as a whole. Communities across the country are voting to cancel their tracking-camera contracts, others are filing records requests to drag secret police deals into daylight, and some people stopped waiting and went out at night with wire cutters.
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Worse on Purpose: Trump is Killing Our Response to the Climate Emergency
Air Date: 8/22/2026
Today we look at how the Republican Party made climate denial its policy more than twenty years ago and is now removing the government's ability to see the problem at all. The Environmental Protection Agency under Bush refused to regulate carbon in 2003, and now the Trump administration is dismantling the science that would help us both avoid worsening the climate emergency and mitigate the inevitable destruction to lives and property now baked into the system.
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IP'd to Death: How Intellectual Property Law Went from a Protection to a Weapon
Air Date: 8/19/2026
Today we trace the corporate capture of ideas themselves. What began as a brief legal incentive granting fourteen years of exclusive rights to a creation has become a system that kept a pandemic vaccine from reaching poorer countries and where entertainment conglomerates and technology giants fence off and sell our own culture back to us.
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Sanctioned Ignorance: The Assault on Museums, Libraries, and American Memory
Air Date: 8/16/2026
Today we look at what Toni Morrison called "sanctioned ignorance," the deliberate manufacture of a version of the past that keeps citizens from connecting the dots between what their government did then and what it's doing now. They're doing it by attacking museums, libraries, and everyone dedicated to ensuring that people have access to accurate information because that's what it takes to implement authoritarian control over a society. It's also the reason that countries under authoritarian rule suffer from the lack of benefits that comes with the free exchange of ideas.
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Open Imperialism in Latin America: Trump Says the Whole Hemisphere Is His to Run
Air Date: 8/12/2026
Today we follow the latest in Western Hemisphere imperialism. American presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump have invoked the Monroe Doctrine and its claim on the whole hemisphere to justify coups, sanctions, and now an outright military abduction in Latin America. Trump, as always, is bragging loudly about the parts most before him knew to keep quiet.
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Suffering is the Strategy: ICE, Mass Deportation, and Demographic Engineering
Air Date: 8/8/2026
Today we examine the mass deportation machine that's been intentionally designed to inflict suffering, from the conditions inside immigration jails to the reckless actions of ICE agents, and the systematic dismantling of accountability. All of this in service of a blatant demographic engineering program to forcibly Whiten the country.
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#1434 Confronting Climate Chaos Through Time (Throwback)
Publish Date: 8-5-2026 Original Air Date: 8–13-2021
Today we dig through the archives to give context to the news of the 2021 IPCC report ringing the alarm bells for the climate crisis.
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Democracy or This Supreme Court, But Not Both
Air Date: 8/1/2026
Today we investigate how the argument moved from what the Supreme Court decides to whether the Court should be rebuilt. Only about one in five Americans has strong confidence in the Court, and the proposals on the table would end lifetime seats, set fixed terms, and add judges across the federal bench. We're arguing that these reforms are necessary for a functioning democracy.
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Country for Old Men: Gerontocracy By Design and the Democracy Problem
Air Date: 7/25/2026
Today we look at the idea that America has become a gerontocracy, a country run by the old, and then interrogate the premise a bit. The wealth, the politicians, and the voting electorate really do concentrate at the top of the age ladder, and benefits for the old tend to stay protected while younger people wait their turn. But several of our sources argue age is the wrong name for the problem, that it is really a story about money and who the whole system was built to serve.
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<...Monthly-ish Mix #11 The Loneliest Superpower: What America Gets for Pushing Everyone Away
Air Date: 7/25/2026
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on the news from June and July without being overwhelming! Organized around a single idea: the same politics that left America friendless abroad is keeping Americans apart at home. The war with Iran ends and America's word counts for less around the world, so Europe starts building its own software instead of buying ours, NATO war-games its own doubts, and China quietly steadies the world's oil markets, while Taiwan shows that real security comes from connection, not threats. At home, the administration revives the red sc...
Post-American Europe: How to Lose Friends and Influence People to Protect Themselves Against You
Air Date: 7/22/2026
Today we look at how three things Europe thought were features turned out to be leverage that could be held against them: American military protection, Silicon Valley software, and cheap Chinese goods. From a French government office running Linux to a secret European defense coalition that bypasses Washington, Europe is quietly swapping out the old architecture rather than dismantling it, one operating system migration and one secret war game at a time.
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#1809 Democrats Seek a Blue Wave, Progressives Push Democratic Socialism, GOP Revive the Red Scare
Air Date: 7/18/2026
Today we examine recent primary elections and how the political smear of crying 'socialism' has been dusted off and aimed at a new generation of candidates. What's changed is that the people being smeared are actually winning elections, and the more the establishment called them dangerous, the stronger their numbers got.
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<...#1634 Abortion as the Tip of the Iceberg (Throwback)
Re-Air Date: 7-14-2026
Original Air Date: 6-7-2024
Banning abortion is wildly unpopular and also one of the primary motivators for the group most strongly supporting the Republican Party and Donald Trump, the Christian Right, which has transformed both the party and politicians into extremists made in their own image, threatening the lives and health of millions and sacrificing democracy in the process.
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Billionaires vs. Democracy: They're Not Coming For Your Job, They're Coming For Your Government (And The Entire Economy)
Air Date: 7/10/2026
Today we look at what it means to live in an economy that has quietly split in two with a soaring stock market driven by AI on one side, a collapsing job market on the other, and the subtle shift in the right to own things, from your music and movies to your car's software, which all underlie the slide toward technofeudalism.
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<...What the World Cup Exposes: Identity, Colonialism, and Racism in 2026
Air Date: 7/7/2026
Today we use the 2026 World Cup to pull everything that runs under the game up into the light. Nearly a quarter of the players are representing a country other than the one they were born in, praised as national heroes when they score but scorned as foreigners when they lose. The history of colonialism built the machinery that turns immigrants into targets, and the results are playing out live around this year's tournament, in the towns that throw their arms open and the borders that slam shut, in who a country will claim and who...
America at 250: The Declaration, the Constitution, and our Crisis of Democracy
Air Date: 7/4/2026
Today we examine what America has celebrated for 250 years and what it keeps refusing to look at. The Declaration promised government by the consent of the governed, but the Constitution protected slavery, concentrated power in elites, and left the definition of "the people" deliberately vague. Every generation inherits that same unresolved contradiction and has to address it for themselves.
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Trump Giving Iran $300 Billion to End His Own War
Air Date: 7/1/2026
Today we examine how four months of American bombardment accomplished what decades of diplomacy never could, making Iran, still run by oppressive theocrats, a regional superpower. An Iranian woman told a reporter she endured the bombing hoping it would topple the regime. Instead, it entrenched it.
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Elon Musk, the First Trillionaire, and the Broken System That Made Him
Air Date: 6/27/2026
Today we trace how one man went from receiving a $278 million government grant to becoming the world's first trillionaire who spent .025% of his wealth to get Trump elected, then used his position to slash programs that help people while stoking race riots overseas.
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Monthly-ish Mix: Manufactured Legitimacy and the Fight to Reclaim It
Air Date: 6/24/2026
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! If you've been pulling back from the news for your own sanity, this one's built for you — a quick recap and reference guide to the past month or two, organized around a single idea: when power can't earn legitimacy, it manufactures it.
The performance. Spectacle, religion, and health branding standing in for real consent: Trump collecting a FIFA "peace prize," Christian nationalism worn as a costume the actual church refuses to bless, and RFK Jr. dressing up a gu...
Department of Injustice: Revenge Prosecutions, Judges Threatened, and Incompetence All the Way Down
Air Date: 6–20-2026
Today we explore how political revenge became official government policy. The Department of Justice has dropped fraud cases while opening vindictive investigations into Trump's critics. Judges who rule against him face death threats at home with no federal protection and thousands of DOJ lawyers have walked out the door, leaving the agency hollowed out by loyalty tests and bent toward retribution.
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Counterfeit Populism: Trump, the 2026 Primaries, and the Era That's Ending (Transcript)
Air Date: 6/17/2026
Today we trace a pattern that repeated across half a dozen states this primary season: working-class candidates running on the cost of living beat the opponents party leadership hand-picked and funded. It looks like ordinary election news, but it's more pieces of a larger shift already underway; away from a politics of left against right and toward a new era of the elite vs working people.
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How Capitalism Created Loneliness and How To Joyfully Organize Our Way to Community
Air Date: 6/12/2026
Today we examine how America caused a loneliness epidemic by tearing down the places where people used to find each other, how big tech is offering AI as a lackluster substitute for connection, and how people are building the opposite of loneliness with block parties, labor unions, and community gardens.
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The US and China Are Fighting Over Taiwan, Semiconductors, and Africa's Minerals
Air Date: 6/10/2026
Today we explore how Taiwan's own people are stuck between the US and China. Fewer and fewer of them want to rejoin China but their faith in America is sinking just as fast as Trump treats them as a bargaining chip. Their own leaders are split on how to respond. And the place that makes most of the world's advanced chips has almost no seat at the table where its future is being decided.
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FIFA Sportswashing Fascism: The World Cup from Mussolini to Trump
Air Date: 6–5-2026
Today we explore sportswashing past and present, from fascist dictators who first weaponized the World Cup to FIFA's modern extractivism model of corrupt capitalism, and why workers, unions, and fans are now organizing to reclaim the game from those profiting off it.
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