#1769 Politics Beyond the Ballot Box: Elections and the Movements that Power Them
Air Date: 2-1-2026
Today we examine what's actually working against the Trump regime and the role of this year's elections. Unsurprisingly, his own voter fraud investigation just proved him a liar, Democrats are overperforming expectations in House special elections, and Zohran Mamdani's campaign based on having fun in community needs to be a model for every movement against authoritarianism.
Our Top Takes this week are about 55 minutes, with the remainder of the show diving deeper into policing immigration, power and organizing, voting rights, and candidacy.
Read more#1768 The End of an Era: The International Rules-Based Order Gives Way to Trump's Might-Makes-Right Plutocracy
Air Date: 1-29-2026
Today we examine the collapse of the American-led, rules-based world order (such as it was) in real time. Canada’s Prime Minister pointed out that the emperor has no clothes and declared US hegemony over while Europe called Trump's bluff on Greenland... all the more reason why he would prefer a fake “Board of Peace” that he can rule over as a worldwide plutocracy.
Read more#1767 Wars Are Won By Teachers and Trump is Attacking Them Like a Foreign Adversary
Air Date: 1-25-2026
Today we examine education as the battleground for democracy itself. We'll hear how authoritarians erase history to maintain power, why liberal arts colleges don't exist in authoritarian societies, how the administration is punishing universities for their political views, and what the detention of student protesters reveals about the cost of dissent in Trump's America.
Read more#1766 The Fragility of State Violence: The ICE Occupation, Renee Good, and the Minneapolis Uprising
Air Date: 1-21-2026
Today, we look at ICE's reign of terror as a paramilitary occupation force and the communities pushing back. We'll hear about Renee Good, an unarmed woman shot dead by federal agents, and Keith Porter, killed by an off-duty agent on New Year's Eve, in addition to historical parallels from the Civil Rights-era Selma, Alabama, and the Boston Massacre. The signs of hope here are that the oppressed won those fights and the oppressors were forced to retreat - there's every reason to believe that the same pattern can repeat today.
Read more#1763 It's Not a Health Care System, it's a Wealth Extraction System
Air Date: 1-9-2026
The Republican Party has been angry about every government service and regulation designed to help average people for at least the past 90 years. And, given any opportunity to hobble or destroy any of those services or regulations in the past decades, they've done just that. Now, after 15 years of striving to destroy the Affordable Care Act - itself originally a conservative plan from the Heritage Foundation (not joking) - they're using the cult-like hold that Trump has on the party to move faster and more recklessly than they are usually able. And again, average people are going to pay the price in both dollars and deaths.
Read more#1762 Trump's Imperialistic Shakedown of Venezuela
Air Date: 1-3-2026
Imperialism is best thought of as a "Wealth Pump," extracting wealth from one country and depositing it in another. Since Venezuela has wealth, and wealth is the only thing Trump cares about, his willingness to break his promise of being the peace president and go along with traditional Republican hawks is not a complicated mystery.
Read more#1761 Monthly-ish Mix: The Machine Cracks—Empire, Exploitation, and the Crumbling Facade
Air Date: 12-31-25
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! This month we start with the infrastructure of imperial violence—from Dick Cheney's legacy to the arms race to Sudan's genocide. Then we expose how power exploits ordinary people through predation and financialized desperation. But here's the thing: resistance is working and the facade is crumbling. From courtroom wins to Mamdani's victory to young Republicans fleeing and conspiracies consuming the right, we end on the insight that authoritarian control is far more fragile than it pretends.
Read more#1760 Hot Mess: Conservative Chaos Below the Surface of Trump's Authoritarian Regime
Air Date: 12-26-2025
Authoritarian governments are always very focused on making it look like they have everything on absolute lock down. Everyone in lockstep, everything proceeding according to plan. But they do this for propaganda purposes, not because it has anything to do with reality. In fact, the opposite is always true. All of which is to say that conservatives are not in chaos because Trump is particularly chaotic, though he is. They're in chaos because that is the natural result of attempting to enforce monolithic thinking and ideological conformity.
Read more#1759 Why Dictators Are Lunatics and Their Followers are Fools
Air Date: 12-22-2025
It's said that mockery is one of the most effective weapons against dictators. I guess it depends on your goal, but still, there's truth there. And the good thing in that regard is that they are so very mockable. No really nice, likable, non-clownish people make themselves dictators and so the people who do are, without exception, absolutely ridiculous lunatics who deserve all the mockery and disdain in the world.
Read more#1354 Police violence and racism are a product of our past (Uprising, Crackdown, Authoritarianism) (Throwback)
Original Air Date: 6–22-2020
Today we take a look at the history of racist policing which flows seamlessly into our present racist policing which itself flows into Trump's authoritarian glee at the opportunity to consolidate violent, racist power in response to protests against violent, racist power.
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