#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.
Read more#1754 The Epstein Files and Donald Trump, Our Predator-in-Chief
Air Date: 11-25-2025
We live in a world awash with baseless conspiracy theories but that doesn't mean there are no true conspiracies, as exemplified by Jeffrey Epstein. But it bears repeating, that we didn't need the exposure of a massive conspiracy to know that Donald Trump was a sexual predator because he said as much on tape before he was elected the first time in 2016.
Read more#1753 What the Shutdown and Weaponized Hunger Exposed About Our Asymmetric Morality
Air Date: 11-21-2025
In an ethical political system, being willing to break the law in order to starve people amid a political dispute wouldn't be a source of greater leverage and power but it is in ours and the shutdown put the wildly different senses of ethics between the parties on full display.
Read more#1752 Reigniting the Nuclear Arms Race: Fat Man, Little Boy, and Donald Trump
Air Date: 11-14-2025
The most dangerous part of nuclear weapons has always been the people in charge of them. As we potentially enter a new arms race, some of the worst people in the world are in charge of the vast majority of nuclear weapons.
Read more#1748 Patriotism in Peril: Democracy, the Military, and the Fight Over What America Means
Air Date: 11-2-2025
A lot of people on the left aren't feeling the love for their country right now and that's understandable but we have some thoughts on more productive ways to channel those conflicting feelings toward a country that is currently falling far short of living up to its founding ideals.
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