Lever Time
From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by the award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, expert analysis, ideas and opinions from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
Episodes
December 4, 2025 • 29 mins
As parents, we’re told homicidal maniacs, drug peddlers, and creeps are lurking in every shadow, waiting to grab your children. But is that true? Is our obsession with keeping our kids safe doing more harm than good?
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota investigates the difference between good parenting and overparenting — and the political history behind our fear that kidnappers are roaming the streets.
David enlists the help of au...
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November 25, 2025 • 34 mins
From flying to online shopping to using social media, everything seems to be getting worse. It’s all — pardon our language here — shittier.
According to today’s Lever Time guest, that’s no accident. Cory Doctorow is the author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. In this episode, Doctorow explains how enshittification works, how it’s infected our online spaces, and what we can do to stop ...
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November 18, 2025 • 53 mins
The U.S. House just voted to force the Trump administration to release every document it has on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful associates. The move comes after Congress released 23,000 pages of Epstein emails and text messages, a data dump that references Donald Trump more than 1,500 times and has so thoroughly tarnished former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers that he’s stepped back from public commitments....
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November 13, 2025 • 41 mins
Maine overwhelmingly voted last year to end Super PACs. A federal judge blocked the ballot measure — but left a kill switch inside the ruling. Larry Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School and head of the nonprofit Equal Citizens, is ready to flip that switch and take his case to the Supreme Court.
In our final episode of Lever Time’s MONEYBOMB series, David Sirota speaks with Lessig about the legal battle against Super PACs and...
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November 6, 2025 • 40 mins
For the first time in the Citizens United era of billionaires and corporate money buying U.S. elections, change may be afoot. This week, Democrats campaigning on a populist message won resounding victories in the face of big-money opposition.
An aging party establishment is still calling for Democrats to be more moderate and centrist, but what if the center has moved? What if populism is the new centrism?
On this new episode of...
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November 3, 2025 • 41 mins
Ahead of the closely watched New York City mayoral race, everyone is looking for a lesson from progressive Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani’s rise to political stardom. The real answer may be a vastly undervalued political strategy: public money. Could public financing of elections overcome Citizens United and the flood of corporate cash and corruption in American politics?
In the latest episode of Lever Time’s MONEYBOMB series,...
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November 1, 2025 • 48 mins
This week, in a special live interview, David Sirota sat down with Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner.
Platner is a military veteran and oyster farmer who is a first-time political candidate running in the Democratic primary in the race to challenge Republican Senate incumbent Susan Collins. His rough-around-the-edges campaign has resonated with Maine’s working-class voters, sending him surging in the polls. But his past socia...
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October 30, 2025 • 47 mins
A group of Montana activists is pushing a ballot initiative attacking Citizens United, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that granted corporations the right to spend unlimited money in politics. While Montana’s Republican Attorney General attempted to block the ballot initiative this week, the fight is far from over.
In the third episode of Lever Time’s MONEYBOMB series, David Sirota sits down with political strategist Tom Moore fr...
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October 23, 2025 • 41 mins
For 15 years, lawmakers have been trying — and failing — to overturn Citizens United, the landmark Supreme Court decision that allows corporations and billionaires to overrun our political system with money. Now, some Congressional Democrats are going big — by trying to enshrine campaign finance protections in the Constitution.
In the second episode of Lever Time’s MONEYBOMB series, David Sirota sits down with Rep. Joe Neguse (D-C...
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October 16, 2025 • 26 mins
Most Americans want to overturn Citizens United v. FEC, the landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision that unleashed unlimited corporate spending on U.S. elections. But two new cases before the high court — including one spearheaded by now-Vice President JD Vance — are instead set to expand that ruling and turn America into a kleptocracy.
For the next several episodes of Lever Time, we’re taking a deep dive into Citizens United and how ...
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October 13, 2025 • 44 mins
Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment have drawn the ire of consumers — and the Federal Trade Commission — for exorbitant ticket prices, misleading hidden fees, and shady resale tactics.
But losing your right to sue Ticketmaster or join a class action lawsuit is now just a click away. Hiding in the company’s new terms-of-use agreement, The Lever found a clause that forces ticket buyers into arbitration, a ...
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October 9, 2025 • 33 mins
While media giants cave to frivolous Trump libel lawsuits and muzzle late-night hosts who step out of line, CBS News’ parent company has announced that the billionaire-backed conservative provocateur Bari Weiss will be the network’s new editor-in-chief.
Today on Lever Time, we’re going back in time to understand how we arrived at this present-day media hellscape. Who set this plan into motion, and how do we fight back?
Click here t...
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October 6, 2025 • 28 mins
Getting a home mortgage used to take weeks of phone calls and paperwork. Now, real estate search platforms like Zillow and Redfin offer comprehensive, nearly one-click homebuying. What are the hidden costs of trusting these industry giants with every step of the process?
Today on Lever Time, producer Natalie Bettendorf speaks with Lever reporter Helen Santoro about her investigation into how these one-stop real estate shops may act...
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October 2, 2025 • 42 mins
Last week, President Donald Trump dramatically altered the U.S. government’s approach to domestic terrorism. NSPM-7, a little-noticed national security directive, expands the list of terrorism indicators to include any behavior that is deemed anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, extreme on gender, hostile towards “traditional American views” on family, and more.
Today on Lever Time, producer Ariella Markowitz sits down ...
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September 29, 2025 • 41 mins
In the first nine months of his second term, President Donald Trump has filed more than 200 executive orders. State attorneys general are filing lawsuits to block the Trump administration’s blatant power grabs, but will our legal system prove strong enough to save American democracy?
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota speaks with Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), who has sued the Trump administration dozens of times, f...
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September 25, 2025 • 61 mins
President Donald Trump says that U.S. violent crime has spiraled so far out of control that he needs to send troops into Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Memphis. But is that really true?
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota speaks with Alec Karakatsanis, award-winning civil rights lawyer and author of the book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, about how government officials are manufacturing fear to justify auth...
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September 19, 2025 • 51 mins
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota talks with bestselling author Bill McKibben, who says the solar energy revolution has reached a tipping point and is now poised to reshape our world.
Click here to learn about Sun Day, a nationwide action this Sunday, Sept. 21, to celebrate and advocate for solar power.
To check out McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, click her...
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September 18, 2025 • 52 mins
First, they cancelled Stephen Colbert; now they’ve pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air. The common denominator? Corporate power.
On today’s episode of Lever Time, David Sirota talks with media-consolidation expert Craig Aaron and monopoly authority Matt Stoller about how media corporations are transforming the news and information environment to curry favor with the Trump administration. Where is this all heading? Are our most basic fr...
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September 15, 2025 • 42 mins
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota speaks with Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary and economics professor, about what he’s learned from working in multiple presidential administrations, where he believes that American politics went wrong, and what the Democratic Party needs to do to save itself — and the country.
Click here for more of this interview, in which Reich explains how the Baby Boomer generation failed America.
You can c...
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September 11, 2025 • 17 mins
A message from David Sirota about recent violence and what we must do to stop it.
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