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PODCAST

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy

Best of the Left: Perspectives on Politics, Culture, and Economics

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!

news politics

All Episodes

02:58:38

#1826 The Mechanics of Complicity from Nazis to...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/10/04

Air Date: 10/3/2026 Today we examine the mechanisms of complicity. We're not all complicit in the worst atrocities but we are complicit in something so it's good to know how it works. Good people go along with bad ideas and thoughtful people allow themselves to be thoughtless all the time. The reasons are often structural but they can be resisted on both the personal level and collectively. Full Show Notes Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Support and Get No Ads!) Link in Bio -

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04:27:42

#1825 We Are Still the 99%: Occupy Wall Street's...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/09/29

Air Date: 9/30/2026 Today we look at the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, which was in full swing 15 years ago and changed how the country talks about inequality and the 1%. In the meantime, the cumulative wealth of the 1% in the US has roughly tripled and Trump has the wealthiest cabinet in history running the country, so the concerns expressed at Occupy have only come into sharper relief. This miniseries helped inspire today's episode, check it out! Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising Full Show Notes

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03:51:43

#1824 The Next Gilded Age: AI Doomsday and the...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/09/26

Air Date: 9/26/2026 Today we explore the layers of chaos surrounding the AI industry, including the idealistic nerds-turned-nazis, the grift, bubble, and doom-marketing business model, and what people are doing to fight back. Full Show Notes Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Support and Get No Ads!) Everything in one place! (Support, contact, follow, books + merch) TOP TAKES KP 1: Do Silicon Valley Billionaires Want to End Democracy? - Political Breakdown - Air Date 8-14-26 KP 2: The

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03:22:03

Monthly-ish Mix #12 The Great American Heist

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/09/23

Air Date: 9/22/2026 The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on the news from July and August without being overwhelming! Organized around a single idea: ask who the system is for, and every story this summer gives the same answer. The administration rewrites the national story while libraries lose their funding. Corporations fence off ideas as private property. Latin America gets treated like a portfolio and Greenland like a drilling site. Police cameras put every driver under permanent

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03:30:39

#1823 Deep Cuts: Occupy Wall Street in Real Time, 15...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/09/19

Air Date: 9/18/2026 Today we're doing something new and different but also very old. Occupy Wall Street just hit its 15th anniversary this month and we thought we'd do something that only we can, which is dip into our archives and pull out the best of the Occupy coverage we played in real time as it was happening as well as some other retrospective coverage that aired 10 years later. Full Show Notes Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Support and Get No Ads!) Everything in one place

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03:07:24

#1822 The State Media Playbook: The FCC and...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/09/15

Air Date: 9/13/2026 Today we trace the two-front war on the American press. On one side, government regulators and members of Congress are going after news outlets for the stories they choose to run. On the other, politically friendly buyers are taking ownership of major networks to turn them into free-market versions of state media. Full Show Notes Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Support and Get No Ads!) Everything in one place! (Support, contact, follow, books + merch) ..TOP TAKES

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02:50:19

#1821 Election Sabotage, Voting System...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/09/10

Air Date: 9/9/2026 Today we look at the strategies being deployed by the Trump administration and their enablers to undermine the midterm elections and what it actually takes to fight back. The lawyers fighting in court against the efforts to destroy our democracy are clear-eyed that you cannot litigate your way to a free election. The most durable defense is a turnout margin too large to plausibly contest, and organizers are building toward it now. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show

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01:29:10

SOLVED! #39 - Why You Should Care About Prisons in...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/09/06

Re-Air Date: 8/5/26 Original Air Date: 4/24/26 Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss: Ch. 1 - Why victims of crime are underserved and actually prefer rehabilitative, root-case approaches to justice Ch. 2 - How cashless bail reform has shrunk jail populations and fueled momentum to block new jail construction Ch. 3 - The local fight over a proposed mega-prison in Arkansas making some conservatives question mass incarceration itself Ch. 4 - A think tank report that proves the glaringly

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03:01:51

#1820 Science and Public Health Under Attack by Our...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/09/03

Air Date: 9/2/2026 Today we look at how public health is being gutted by a system that took ordinary parental worry and organized, radicalized and monetized it into an anti-science "wellness" movement large enough to seize real political power. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus Shows + No Ads!) Use our links to shop Bookshop.org and

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03:25:57

#1819 Coerced Sterilization, Abortion Bans, and the...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/08/31

Air Date: 8/29/2026 Today we examine what happens when the state wants to decide whether a person reproduces. A century ago, American courts sanctioned the forced sterilization of women deemed unfit to reproduce. 60 years ago, a communist dictator ran a pronatalist experiment with disastrous results. Now, abortion access is collapsing and a new pronatalist movement is rising to wreak havoc. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle

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03:26:47

#1818 Flock Cameras, ICE, and the Surveillance State...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/08/26

Air Date: 8/25/2026 Today we explore the resistance to Flock cameras and mass surveillance as a whole. Communities across the country are voting to cancel their tracking-camera contracts, others are filing records requests to drag secret police deals into daylight, and some people stopped waiting and went out at night with wire cutters. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com

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03:31:44

#1817 Worse on Purpose: Trump is Killing Our Response...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/08/22

Air Date: 8/22/2026 Today we look at how the Republican Party made climate denial its policy more than twenty years ago and is now removing the government's ability to see the problem at all. The Environmental Protection Agency under Bush refused to regulate carbon in 2003, and now the Trump administration is dismantling the science that would help us both avoid worsening the climate emergency and mitigate the inevitable destruction to lives and property now baked into the system. Full Show Notes

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03:31:16

#1816 IP'd to Death: How Intellectual Property Law...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/08/20

Air Date: 8/19/2026 Today we trace the corporate capture of ideas themselves. What began as a brief legal incentive granting fourteen years of exclusive rights to a creation has become a system that kept a pandemic vaccine from reaching poorer countries and where entertainment conglomerates and technology giants fence off and sell our own culture back to us. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or email

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03:14:12

#1815 Sanctioned Ignorance: The Assault on Museums,...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/08/16

Air Date: 8/16/2026 Today we look at what Toni Morrison called "sanctioned ignorance," the deliberate manufacture of a version of the past that keeps citizens from connecting the dots between what their government did then and what it's doing now. They're doing it by attacking museums, libraries, and everyone dedicated to ensuring that people have access to accurate information because that's what it takes to implement authoritarian control over a society. It's also the reason that countries under

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03:11:19

#1814 Open Imperialism in Latin America: Trump Says...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/08/13

Air Date: 8/12/2026 Today we follow the latest in Western Hemisphere imperialism. American presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump have invoked the Monroe Doctrine and its claim on the whole hemisphere to justify coups, sanctions, and now an outright military abduction in Latin America. Trump, as always, is bragging loudly about the parts most before him knew to keep quiet. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle

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03:32:28

#1813 Suffering is the Strategy: ICE, Mass...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/08/09

Air Date: 8/8/2026 Today we examine the mass deportation machine that's been intentionally designed to inflict suffering, from the conditions inside immigration jails to the reckless actions of ICE agents, and the systematic dismantling of accountability. All of this in service of a blatant demographic engineering program to forcibly Whiten the country. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or email

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01:06:43

#1434 Confronting Climate Chaos Through Time (Throwback)

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/08/05

Publish Date: 8-5-2026 Original Air Date: 8–13-2021 Today we dig through the archives to give context to the news of the 2021 IPCC report ringing the alarm bells for the climate crisis. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus Shows + No Ads!) Use our links to shop Bookshop.org and Libro.fm for a non-evil book and audiobook purchasing

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02:58:22

#1812 Democracy or This Supreme Court, But Not Both

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/08/02

Air Date: 8/1/2026 Today we investigate how the argument moved from what the Supreme Court decides to whether the Court should be rebuilt. Only about one in five Americans has strong confidence in the Court, and the proposals on the table would end lifetime seats, set fixed terms, and add judges across the federal bench. We're arguing that these reforms are necessary for a functioning democracy. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle

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03:04:02

#1811 Country for Old Men: Gerontocracy By Design and...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/07/29

Air Date: 7/25/2026 Today we look at the idea that America has become a gerontocracy, a country run by the old, and then interrogate the premise a bit. The wealth, the politicians, and the voting electorate really do concentrate at the top of the age ladder, and benefits for the old tend to stay protected while younger people wait their turn. But several of our sources argue age is the wrong name for the problem, that it is really a story about money and who the whole system was built to serve. Full

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04:58:37

Monthly-ish Mix #11 The Loneliest Superpower: What...

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on... ·

2026/07/26

Air Date: 7/25/2026 The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on the news from June and July without being overwhelming! Organized around a single idea: the same politics that left America friendless abroad is keeping Americans apart at home. The war with Iran ends and America's word counts for less around the world, so Europe starts building its own software instead of buying ours, NATO war-games its own doubts, and China quietly steadies the world's oil markets, while Taiwan shows that

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803 results

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