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!
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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AI Spent $540 Billion to Make You Lonelier: Betting Against Jobs, Art, and Community
Air Date: 6–3-2026
Today we examine the AI industry's economic house of cards, the ideology Silicon Valley uses to sell a broken product, and the very real human costs being paid by workers, the lonely, and communities bulldozed for data centers nobody asked for.
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1.8 Billion for the Mob and a Kill List for Dissent: Trump's payout fund and counterterrorism strategy, decoded
Air Date: 5–30-2026
Today we examine how Trump turned a sham lawsuit into a $1.8 billion reward fund for his political allies who attacked the Capitol on January 6th while implementing a counterterrorism strategy that erases right-wing extremism from the threat landscape, refocuses on left-wing violence that hardly exists and threatens to "find and kill" those they deem enemies.
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You Say You Want A Revolution: Successful Revolutions are the Boring Ones
Air Date: 5–26-2026
Today we examine what separates successful revolutions from failed ones, ask why so many revolutions of the 2010s fell short, understand how revolutionary energy gets neutralized, and explore the strategic case for nonviolent resistance.
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From MAHA to Measles: RFK's Public Health Purge Will Make America Sick Again
Air Date: 5–23-2026
Today we examine the real-world cost of dismantling America's public health infrastructure, the dangerous pseudoscience driving RFK Jr.'s health agenda, and the contradictions fracturing the MAHA movement from within.And now on to the show
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#1793 Anti-Immigrant Brutality Costs Countries More Than Their Morals: ICE, Mass Deportation, and the Global Far-Right
Air Date: 5/20/2026
Today we examine how the Trump administration is quietly reshaping its unpopular immigration crackdown by moving enforcement out of public view. Plus, we explain how anti-immigration politics is spreading through the post-colonial world, highlighting how it's reshaping political parties and public debate in the UK, Canada, and Australia.
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Capitalist Class Warfare: AI, Billionaire Capture, and the How to Fight Back
Air Date: 5/15/2026
Today we examine what it would actually take to claw back democracy from billionaire capture — and why some people think it's more possible than it looks. We'll hear about California's proposed billionaire wealth tax, AOC's vision for change that doesn't depend on positional power, and why Peter Thiel's new "AI Tribunal of Truth" may have accidentally revealed exactly what the ruling class fears most.
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Jim Crow 2.0 — SCOTUS Kills the Voting Rights Act and Unleashes the Gerrymandering War
Air Date: 5/12/2026
Today we examine the redistricting scramble unleashed by the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act. We'll hear how Southern states moved within days to crack majority-Black districts, how Tennessee banned public input to rush through new maps, and why every governor's race, state legislative seat, and secretary of state contest in 2026 is now a redistricting fight.
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Assassin Nation: How Political Violence Got Normalized And How To Reverse It
Air Date: 5–9-2026
Today we examine how political violence has always been woven into the fabric of American life and who gets to decide what counts as violence in the first place. We'll hear about presidential assassinations, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, and the long history of state-sanctioned violence. And I'll discuss the only real way to bend the curve back away from endemic violence in the US.
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Boomcession: Why the Economy Looks Great on Paper and Hurts in Real Life
Air Date: 05-06-2026 
Today we examine how the U.S. war on Iran is producing an economic crisis with echoes of the 1970s stagflation era which explains why Trump is now less popular on inflation than Jimmy Carter. We'll also be exploring various element of the structure of our economy, including how GDP became a deeply misleading measure of welfare, why consumer spending increasingly goes toward things people don't want to buy, and how gambling and junk fees are literally counted as economic growth.
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Monthly-ish Mix: The America That Almost Was—Empire Abroad, Control at Home, and the Long Arc of Resistance
Air Date: 05/01/2026
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! This month we open with Jesse Jackson's death as a reckoning with the multiracial coalition America chose not to build, trace the American playbook from the 1953 Iran coup to Cuba to the current war on Iran, examine how the same logic of control operates at home through AI monopolies, sports money, and captured courts, and close with the religious and labor traditions that have always driven change — plus Orbán's defeat in Hungary as proof that authoritarian projects don't last...
The American President vs The American Pope: Leo XIV, Trump, and the MAGA-Catholic Rift
Air Date: 4–29-2026
Today we explore the extraordinary clash between Pope Leo XIV and the Trump White House — a feud involving military threats, medieval papal history, and an American-born pope who refuses to back down. We'll hear why analysts say MAGA's religiosity is pure aesthetic, and what that hollowness means for the millions of Americans still taking their faith seriously.
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Defeating Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the Authoritarian Playbook Worldwide
Air Date: 4/24/2026
Today we explore how Viktor Orban spent 16 years transforming Hungary into a blueprint for 21st-century autocracy, how that blueprint traveled directly to the United States and what Hungary's stunning defeat of Orban can teach Americans about fighting back against authoritarianism.
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Our Longest War Has Been a Lie All Along (The Afghanistan Papers) (Throwback)
Re-Air Date: 4-21-2026
Original Air Date: 1–18-2020
Today we take a look at The Afghanistan Papers which reveal in stark detail much of what the anti-war movement has known or strongly suspected since the beginning. Going beyond the scope of The Pentagon Papers of the Vietnam War era, The Afghanistan Papers feature interviews and documentation from top-ranking officials admitting from the start that they had no idea what they were doing in Afghanistan.
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SOLVED! SAMPLE! #38 - Keepin' it Class-y: How Class Structure and Wealth Inequality Keep Us Stuck
Air Date: 4-8-26
Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:
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Ch. 1 - The history of the war on poverty in the U.S. Ch. 2 - How the wealthiest 9.9% are keeping the rest of us down with their heads in the sand Ch. 3 - The history and revival of the workers' education movement SOLVED! BACKSTAGE: Beyond the Algorithm (Members Only!): How your class impacts your tastes.Â
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Iran and the Chain Reaction: The War Nobody Thought Through (Or, Bomb First, Think Never)
Air Date: 4/17/2026
Today we examine how the U.S. war with Iran has exposed the deep structural rot at the heart of American power, the global economic catastrophe quietly building beneath the surface, and the cuts felt at home in order to pay for it all.
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<...Who Gets to Be American, Who Gets to Vote, and Who Decides
Air Date: 4/14/2026
Today we examine the legal battles shaking the foundations of American citizenship and voting rights as Trump's legal team uses the courts as a weapon against democratic participation — and how advocates are fighting back. We'll hear about the three-D playbook of deceive, disrupt, and deny used by authoritarians and being deployed by Trump ahead of the midterms, and what ordinary people can do right now to protect their votes before November.
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