Left Anchor

Today we are discussing the home stretch of the New York City mayoral race, Andrew Cuomo's decent into outright gutter racism and Islamophobia, the ongoing ICE raids across the country, Trump's escalating war on Venezuela, and the surprising story of how rent control in Hong Kong led to a building boom in the 1920s.

Is it possible to reform America's blighted hellscape of car-dependent suburban sprawl, big box stores, strip malls, and stroads into something more healthy and human? Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon (of the podcast The War on Cars) argue yes, in their new book Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. They outline the gruesome history of automobiles, what they've done to American lives and cities, and how we might RETVRN. Check out the famous Andre Gorz essay "The Social Ideology of the Motorcar" here.

Today Ryan has Sarah Taber, a small farmer and proprietor of the Farm to Taber YouTube channel, on to talk about just what is going on with American farming--the collapse in soybean exports, what farmers thought they would by voting for Trump, how he has made the H-2A visa program even more exploitative, why so many farmers are addicted to producing corn and soybeans, and more. Subscribe now to listen to the whole thing!

Now that the dust has started to settled around the whole Charlie Kirk thing, we've brought on Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown, to discuss his Boston Review piece about Ezra Klein's hagiography of Kirk, the discussion Klein had with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and why moderate liberals seem so at sea politically. Other readings mentioned in the discussion: Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, by Thomas Ricks, and "Democrats Must Embrace War Mindset," by Samantha Hancox-Li.

Today we have Danish MP Pelle Dragsted on to talk about his book Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy. We discuss what is distinctive about the Nordic socialist tradition, how much of it is left after many decades of neoliberal attacks, what people can learn from it today, and more.  Subscribe here to listen to the whole thing!

Today we have Phil Christman on to talk about his book Why Christians Should Be Leftists. Is there a model of Christianity aside from right-wing fundamentalism--something more in like with the teachings of this fellow Jesus Christ? The David Bentley Hart essay mentioned can be found here.

Today we have Dr. Jonathan Howard, who writes at Science Based Medicine, on to discuss his new book Everyone Else Is Lying to You: How the medical establishment weaponized doubt to spread COVID, normalize quackery, and undermine public health. It's all about a cohort of highly credentialed and elite doctors who spread grotesque disinformation about Covid from the very start of the pandemic, and kept doing so even as their predictions were repeatedly proven wrong. And now many of those people are in charge of America's public health bureaucracy, tearing it to shreds--when they aren't getting Jonathan's YouTube channel nuked by abusing the company's copyright policy. Why and how did they do this, and what might we do to stop this from happening in the future?

Today we have writer and friend of the pod Osita Nwanevu on to talk about his new book The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. He goes back to political brass tacks--what democracy actually is, why it's important, why we don't have it, and why we should work to achieve the goals set forth in the Declaration of Independence for the first time.

Ryan recently visited Greenland to report on their public sector, which turns out to be extremely large and critical to the local economy. How and why did this develop? Then we discuss some recent gerrymandering news. Stay tuned for the full article in the next issue of the Prospect! And subscribe here to hear the rest of the episode.

Today we're interviewing Katie Brennan, who just won the primary for the New Jersey state Assembly in Hudson County. She explains how the state Democratic machine de facto abolished democracy with a rigged ballot design, how it changed, and how she overcame a tidal wave of money to win. Subscribe now to hear the rest of the episode!