Johanna Fernández is a historian of social movements who is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, a deeply researched history of one of the most vibrant and fascinating social movements of the 20th century.From their origins as a Chicago street gang in the early 60s, the Young Lords became an effective grassroots radical movement, the Puerto Rican counterpart to the Black Panthers. They helped produce an early version of the "patient's bill of rights" in medicine, organized lead testing for children, protested inadequate garbage collection, and demonstrated a model of how to fight for the rights and dignity of a marginalized community. Though short-lived, the Young Lords offer a great many lessons for those in our own time who want to work on the same kinds of issues.Today, Prof. Fernández joins us to recount the history of the Young Lords, to show us how they succeeded and why they ultimately fell apart. It's an important story that everyone who wants radical social change should be sure to familiarize themselves with.“Their intrepid organizing campaigns, literature, bold political analysis, and media savvy reclaimed the dignity of New York’s hardest-working and most exploited workers and replaced stereotypes with powerful images of radical, strategic, and articulate militancy….The Young Lords had their finger on the pulse not just of the moment but also of the future. They built a profoundly multiethnic movement: approximately 25 percent of their members were black American, and between 5 and 8 percent were non–Puerto Rican Latinxs, among them Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Panamanians, and Colombians. The Young Lords’ membership reflected the demographic character of a postmodern city, of which New York and Los Angeles are today the best expressions…For today’s organizers, the Young Lords offer a wealth of practical lessons. First and foremost, if your intention is to build a movement that responds to the conditions of real people, there is no substitute for hands-on organizing on the ground and at the local level….”  —Johanna FernándezRead a Current Affairs article on the broad lessons to be learned from 60s movements here. 

Adam Glenn is a Current Affairs reader who has produced a free online book called Brain Worms: How Right-Wing Propaganda Destroys Reason, Conscience, and Democracy. Today he joins to discuss how (and why) to engage with conservative arguments (which Nathan does a lot as well). The text of Adam's book usefully explains in plain language the flaws in right-wing philosophy, but the comprehensive bibliography alone is well worth browsing through. Adam explains how familiarizing yourself with the other side's arguments thoroughly can help you feel less frustrated when you encounter those arguments, and we go through some of the key arguments. "Many liberals and leftists, however, don’t know the arguments. They might happen to be correct to think the Right’s arguments are flawed, but too often they don’t know why (or at least don’t know how to articulate why). When they’re confronted with the Right’s arguments, rather than responding in a rational manner, they’re often dismissive, combative, or taken aback—unable to find a rational foothold upon which to formulate a convincing counter-argument. This allows the Right to paint their targets as naive, unrealistic, “bleeding heart” saps who don’t understand “how the world works,” and gives the impression that the Right’s ideas are possibly correct. We should therefore do everything we can to neutralize the Right’s arguments and convince others to help make the world a better place, rather than allow right-wing propaganda to remain unchecked in the service of power and privilege." — Adam GlennThe Philip Agre article "What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?" can be found here. 

Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of the new book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. Her book looks at the cruelty of the myths of being "self-made" or "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." In the first part of her book, Quart examines the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Horatio Alger, Ayn Rand, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (one of Quart's chapters is called "Little House of Propaganda") to show how radically our images of what it takes to succeed depart from the lived reality. She exposes the constraints that keep people from achieving a decent standard of living, and shows how "dependency" isn't a bad thing—in fact, we're all interdependent by our nature. Quart's book shows how people help each other through mutual aid and presents an inspiring alternative to the existing vision of the "American dream." "As much as individualism dominates, millions in this country have also pushed against the singular and toward its opposite, coming together in cooperatives, collectives, and mutual aid societies...While the fairy tale of solo success fails many Americans, there are alternative models that can take that fiction's place, ones rooted in the tenet of interdependence and working together to life one another up. We might also accept our dependence, permitting an acknowledging societal aid and help from other structures of support." — Alissa Quart More on MLK's speech about car commercials can be read at Vox (note the mention of Current Affairs in the article.) Dolly Parton's horrible Squarespace ad is here. The book about "meritocracy" is The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young.  

R.S. Benedict is a speculative fiction writer whose popular 2021 essay "Everyone Is Beautiful But Nobody is Horny," published in Blood Knife, argued that the disappearance of sex from movies is linked to wider cultural trends toward the celebration of militarism and violence, the shunning of hedonistic pleasure, a utilitarian disdain for frivolous things, and increasing social isolation. Today, Benedict joins to discuss this essay as well as her 2022 piece on "safe fiction." We also tie in the rise of McMansions and defend messiness over sterility. The overarching theme of the conversation is the need to resist the drift toward a Spartan culture in which our bodies are built for fighting rather than pleasure, we are each worker-units whose job is to maximize GDP, and everything unnecessary, gratuitous, or chaotic is to be purged. Benedict is a defender of humanity in all its diversity, sloppiness, and, yes, horniness, and presents a vision for a culture—in film, architecture, and everywhere else—that lets us be ourselves and celebrates desire and fun."A generation or two ago, it was normal for adults to engage in sports not purely as self-improvement but as an act of leisure. People danced for fun; couples socialized over tennis; kids played stickball for lack of anything else to do. Solitary exercise at the gym also had a social, rather than moral, purpose. People worked out to look hot so they could attract other hot people and fuck them. Whatever the ethos behind it, the ultimate goal was pleasure. Not so today. Now, we are perfect islands of emotional self-reliance, and it is seen as embarrassing and co-dependent to want to be touched. We are doing this for ourselves, because we, apropos of nothing, desperately want to achieve a physical standard set by some invisible Other in an insurance office somewhere." — R.S. Benedict 

Khaled Beydoun is a professor of law at Wayne State and the author of two books, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear and The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. American Islamophobia is a definitive analysis of the roots and spread of anti-Muslim animus in the United States, but The New Crusades expands the analysis to look at how the same bigotry manifests around the world, from France to India to China to New Zealand. The new book also shows how the "Global War on Terror" launched by the U.S. after 9/11 helped to fuel anti-Muslim bigotry elsewhere—for instance, China's persecution of Uyghurs deploys justifications and rhetoric lifted straight from the Bush administration. "The way in which the media was disseminating this violent, vile information about Muslims—people like me, who sat across from him—mobilized [the soldier] to enlist in a war in a place that he had no knowledge of. He just knew that he wanted to defend his country, he wanted vengeance, and that these Muslims, these Arabs who were a world away were the culprits of this 9/11 terrorist attack...When he came back from the war, you could tell that he felt deceived by this country...he didn't have the same love for country that he did before he left for that war because he realized how the war had broken people like him and told lies about people like me." — Khaled Beydoun Brown University's Costs of War project has produced a horrifying tally of the human misery caused by the "War on Terror," available here. The interview Nathan mentions with Vietnam veteran W.D. Ehrhart is here (part II). 

Émile Torres, an intellectual historian, criticizes the ideologies of effective altruism and longtermism for their dystopian tendencies. He discusses how these ideologies neglect to address systems of power, colonialism, and capitalism. The podcast explores the principles of effective altruism, the concept of long-termism and its implications, and the potential negative consequences of these ideologies. It also delves into the ethical implications of non-birth, maximizing well-being, and intergenerational justice.

Jennifer Jacquet is not actually an evil corporate consultant. She's a professor in NYU's Department of Environmental Studies and deputy director of the school's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. But you might think otherwise if you flipped open her book The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World, a tongue-in-cheek handbook supposedly directed toward CEOs who want to fully follow Milton Friedman's dictum that "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits." The Playbook shows these readers what to do when they find that the spread of scientific knowledge is posing a threat to their bottom line. Using case studies from the cigarette industry, the fossil fuel industry, and more, it's a "guide on whom to hire, how to recruit experts, tips for effective communication, and ways to successfully challenge the science, the policy, and the scientists, reporters, and activists using science to further their policy agendas.”In fact, Prof. Jacquet is interested in exposing these techniques. Her book shows just how many insidious ways there are to sow doubt on scientific research that demonstrates a corporate harm, and she teaches readers to identify the familiar tricks that are used to keep effective public policies from curtailing corporate wrongdoing. Today she joins us to discuss the methods that have been perfected for protecting corporations from the ongoing risk posed by the public's exposure to truth.“In the same way that a casino can affect the character of a town, corporate-funded scientific denial has contributed to the erosion of scientific authority and mistrust in the government. In this casino, however, we are gambling with our health, the planet, and our most reliable way of knowing the world. The stakes could not get higher." — Prof. Jennifer Jacquet

Van Jackson is a dissident among foreign policy intellectuals, a harsh critic of the infamous "Blob." His Un-Diplomatic newsletter is essential reading (and its accompanying podcast essential listening), and his analyses of U.S. policy in the Pacific in Foreign Affairs are very useful for those who want to understand what is going on in the region. These include: Great-Power Competition Is Bad for DemocracyAmerica is Turning Asia into a Powder Keg The Problem With Primacy: America's Dangerous Quest to Dominate the Indo-PacificAmerica's Indo-Pacific FollyHe is the author of the new book Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace (Yale University Press) and today he joins the Current Affairs podcast to explain why he thinks U.S. policy in Asia is dangerous and putting us unnecessarily on the path towards conflict with China. It's a vital conversation for understanding the most consequential tensions in the world today. "It's patently obvious that by pursuing primacy we're making ourselves the enemy of what remains of the Asian peace." — Van JacksonA Current Affairs article about U.S. relations with China by Nathan and Noam Chomsky can be read here.

Cordelia Fine is a psychologist and philosopher of science whose work brilliantly demolishes myths about the "nature" of differences between men and women. Prof. Fine has written three books, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, and Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds.Today she joins for a conversation about various popular myths about how men and women are "wired" and why a lot of supposedly sound science on sex differences is, in fact, untrustworthy or downright wrong. Prof. Fine shows how these kinds of claims about the biological roots of social gender differences have a long, long history, and they're not any more sound now than they were in the 1900s when suffrage was being opposed on the grounds that women were biologically incapable of voting intelligently. We discuss the contemporary claims of people like Jordan Peterson and the Google memo guy about the supposed scientific foundations of various kinds of gender inequalities.“As the number of studies reporting sex differences in the brain pile up, the argument that sexual selection has created two kinds of human brain—male and female—seems to get stronger and stronger. Could John Gray have been right after all when he claimed that men are from Mars and women are from Venus? Some scientists have argued that although average differences in the way males and females think, feel, and act may, on a trait-by-trait basis, be relatively modest, the accumulated effect is profound. 'Psychologically, men and women are almost a different species,' was the conclusion of one Manchester Business School academic...If the sexes are essentially different, then equality of opportunity will never lead to equality of outcome. We’re told that 'if the various workplace and non-workplace gaps could be distilled down to a single word, that word would not be ‘discrimination’ but "testosterone"'; that evolved sex differences in risk preferences are 'one of the pre-eminent causes of gender difference in the labor market'; and that rather than worrying about the segregated pink and blue aisles of the toy store we should respect the 'basic and profound differences' in the kinds of toys boys and girls like to play with, and just 'let boys be boys, let girls be girls.' This is Testosterone Rex: that familiar, plausible, pervasive, and powerful story of sex and society. Weaving together interlinked claims about evolution, brains, hormones, and behavior, it offers a neat and compelling account of our societies’ persistent and seemingly intractable sex inequalities. Testosterone Rex can appear undefeatable. Whenever we discuss the worthy topic of sex inequalities and what to do about them, it is the giant elephant testicles in the room. What about our evolved differences, the dissimilarities between the male brain and the female brain? What about all that male testosterone? But dig a little deeper and you will find that rejecting the Testosterone Rex view doesn’t require denial of evolution, difference, or biology. Indeed, taking them into account is the basis of the rejection...Testosterone Rex gets it wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Contemporary scientific understanding of the dynamics of sexual selection, of sex effects on brain and behavior, of testosterone-behavior relations, and of the connection between our evolutionary past and our possible futures, all undermine the Testosterone Rex view.” — Cordelia Fine, Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society

Today on the podcast: Nathan takes a turn as the guest, to discuss his new book Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments. Get your copy now! Responding to the Right goes through arguments about abortion, minimum wages, trans rights, immigration, Big Government and much more and shows both why right-wing talking points are wrong and how to effectively defeat them. In Part I of the book, Nathan discusses how conservative arguments work and why they can sound persuasive to people. Then in Part II he responds to 25 different arguments. In each case, he uses direct quotes from right-wingers making the argument (to avoid the accusation of "attacking straw men.")In this episode, managing editor Lily Sánchez takes a turn as the host for a conversation with Nathan on the book, the question of why it's worth responding to the right at all, and the common structure of conservative arguments. "I've tried to make this book as comprehensive and useful of a handbook as I can. I think many of us on the left can get frustrated when we're not quite sure how to articulate a persuasive response to a conservative argument even when we know it's wrong. This book will help those who want snappy retorts that 'demolish' and 'destroy' the right, but it will also hopefully unsettle some conservatives who will be faced with definitive irrefutable proof that everything they believe is wrong." — Nathan J. Robinson