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!
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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...#1783 The Ideology of a Cancer Cell: AI, Surveillance, and Silicon Valley's Psychopath Problem
Air Date: 4/10/2026
Today we examine the ideology quietly driving Silicon Valley — a worldview that treats growth, extraction, and the erasure of human messiness as virtues. We'll hear how tech leaders from Sam Altman to Larry Ellison embody a kind of corporate psychopathy, why Zuckerberg never understood what Facebook actually is, and how the cult of "go for its own sake" may be the most dangerous religion of our time.
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SOLVED! SAMPLE! #37 - Solidarity Forever: Boycotts, Strikes, & the Labor Movement We Need
Air Date: 4-1-26
Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:
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Ch. 1 - How to boycott better Ch. 2 - Why REI workers have voted to boycott the upcoming May sale and how you can help Ch. 3 - Why meatpacking workers are striking in Colorado Ch. 4 - Comparing the US labor movement with the Canadian labor movement Ch. 5 - Strengthening, and expanding the vision for, today's labor movement SOLVED! BACKSTAGE: Beyond the Algorithm (Members Only!): How politics killed the once transformational National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)Â
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Oligarchy Unmasked: President Musk, the crackup of capitalism, and the MAGA meltdown (Throwback)
Re-Air Date: 04-07-26
Original Air Date: 1-15-2025
Elon Musk is leading the way for his class of tech broligarchs anxious to take over the MAGA movement and shape it to their own ends of deregulation, tax cuts, and lucrative government contracts. The disappointment that is inevitable for the MAGA populists is coming even faster than expected.
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Cuba's Crisis: Trump's Deadly Embargo, Blackouts, and Dream of Regime Change
Air Date: 4/3/2026
Today we examine how decades of U.S. policy toward Cuba set the stage for the current crisis, we explore the human cost of the U.S. oil blockade on Cuba's 11 million people, and how the U.S. justifies an illegal siege while claiming to act in Cuba's interest using time-tested propaganda tactics.
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Your Team Is a Hedge Fund Now: How Gambling and Billionaires Captured American Sports
Air Date: 3–31-2026
Today we examine how money and power have captured American sports from every angle — gambling platforms operating as unregulated casinos, private equity turning franchises into financial assets, leagues suppressing player pay while selling access to politicians, and a sports media apparatus too compromised to report any of it. It's almost all the problems with America on display in one industry.
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ALMOST SOLVED! SAMPLE! #1 - Liberation Theology & What Redemption Really Looks Like
Air Date: 3–26-26
Welcome to ALMOST SOLVED!, the show that's almost like SOLVED! but one or more things are missing, namely the guarantee of a solution at the end and possibly also one of our cohosts.
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Today, Jay!, Amanda, and Deon discuss:
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Ch. 1 - Deon's research for his recent Best of the Left episode #1779: "Community After God: Why the Left Needs What Church Provided" Ch. 2 - Listener voicemail & comments on past episodes Ch. 3 - How to heal from the harm of this mess with the article "Culture of Healing" from The...Cynicism Is a Scab: Hope, Solidarity, and the Labor Fight That Never Stopped
Air Date: 3/27/2026
Today we examine the relationship between labor education, moral ambition, and the possibility of a better world. We'll hear about IWW members building a "Philosophy 101" for organizers, a historian's argument that humanity is fundamentally cooperative rather than selfish, and why getting labor history into public schools may be one of the most important organizing projects of our time.
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Community After God: Why the Left Needs What Church Provided
Air Date: 3/24/2026
Today we explore what happens when people reject religious dogma but still hunger for ritual, meaning, and the concrete benefits of community. We'll hear from secular assemblies building "church without creed," atheist Quakers finding silence sacred, and a Caribbean thinker designing a naturalistic pagan practice built around science and seasonal ritual — all asking what religion can be when you strip away the supernatural.
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SOLVED! SAMPLE! #36 - Bribery Jazz - Corruption is the Water We Swim In
Air Date: 3–18-26
Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:
Ch. 1 - The dark history of money in politics, aka: corruption Ch. 2 - What the left must do to actually win Ch. 3 - What the rest of the world can teach America SOLVED! BACKSTAGE: Beyond the Algorithm (Members Only!): The reports of Christian fundamentalist "talk" in the military as the US attacked Iran
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...AI, the Pentagon, Labor and Capitalism: The Fight Over Who Controls the Future
Air Date: 3/19/2026
Today we explore the long history of technological disruption — from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of software engineering — and ask whether AI is genuinely different this time, all while autonomous weapons dissolve accountability for the militaries using them and capitalism prevents AI companies from maintaining their ethical aspirations.
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How Christian Nationalism, Oil, and Zionism Built The War Against Iran
Air Date: 3/15/2026
Today we examine how a century of foreign intervention created incompatible national memories between the US and Iran and how Netanyahu exploited that history to maneuver Trump into a war he didn't understand, promising a quick decapitation strike while knowing full well it would become a months-long regional conflict, at minimum.
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Trump's Pharaoh Complex, Our Flawed Constitution, and the 250th Anniversary
Air Date: 3/11/2026
Today is episode 1776, in the year of our nation's 250th birthday, and we thought the occasion called for something big. So, we're tracing the full arc — from the constitutional compromises that made this country possible to the authoritarian vanity project that those compromises eventually also made possible. We're talking about the history, the structures, and the insecure current-but-temporary president who thinks a $400 million ballroom and a coin with his face on both sides will make him a pharaoh.
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SOLVED! FROM THE ARCHIVES - "Collaborators, Internal Exiles, and Dissidents" (Original Air Date: 01-26-25)
Re-Air Date: 01–26-25
Unless you were a member in January of 2025, this episode of SOLVED! will be brand new to you! If you were a member back then, THANK YOU and this one is worth a re-listen. We're working on slowly increasing our production again, but, for now, enjoy this episode from our archives (and before YouTube) where Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:
00:00:00 - Ch. 1 - The mindset of collaborators
00:07:55 - Ch. 2 - Why many people turn inward and drop out - at their own risk - under authoritarianism
00:32:14 - Ch...
Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and the Remaking of American Politics
Air Date: 3/7/2026
Welcome to this episode of the Award-Winning Best of the Left Podcast. Today we examine the life and legacy of Reverend Jesse Jackson civil rights icon, two-time presidential candidate and one of the most consequential political figures of the 20th century.
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Monthly-ish Mix: Who's in Charge?—The Scramble for Control of Nations, Bodies, and Minds
Air Date: 3/3/2026
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! This month we examine the multi-front struggle for control: military force and economic coercion seizing resources abroad, institutions weaponized to constrain bodies at home, platforms and propaganda capturing minds, and the democratic resistance proving that organized people can still win.
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...Envisioning a Leftist Economic Future of Postcapitalism, High-Tech Automation, Universal Basic Income and a World (Mostly) Without Work (Throwback)
Original Air Date: 3-1-2024
We don't have to think too hard to understand the fears of a world in which work, and the ability of millions to support themselves, are lost to automation and artificial intelligence. But that is only a capitalist future in which the benefits of technological advancement are hoarded by the already-wealthy. Today we imagine a different path.
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