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

Air Date: 9–24-25

Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:

• Ch. 1 - Intro, and quick follow up on bad satire

• Ch. 2 - The new culture of ‘buy now pay later’ and how these companies are manipulating the public to normalize the culture of overconsumption

• Ch. 3 - How companies pass the environmental toll of their products on the public, and the rise of “cute” debt

• Ch. 4 - The way heavy ‘buy now ...

Original Air Date: 11/15/2022

Today, we take a look at our extremely steady history of political violence from the Revolution, through the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, into the Civil Rights era, the Militia Movement and domestic terrorism, and now to our current once-again-radicalized, right-wing movement willing to use and tacitly condone violence as a political ...

Air Date 9/23/2025

All that is happening in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination was quite predictable because we've actually seen this game plan play out before. The only thing we didn't know was what would be the catalyst to really put the autocracy into high gear.

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Full Show No...

Air Date: 9–20-25

Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:

• Ch. 1 - The right-wing’s continued attempts at satire
• Ch. 2 - Manufactured outrage about male cheerleaders and sorority dances
• Ch. 3 - How political outsiders always adopt new tech, and how that ties to pushing back against misinformation
• Ch. 4 - Final thoughts o...

Air Date 9/20/2025

The escalations are happening so fast now that even though this episode is about Russia increasing tensions by violating NATO airspace in Poland with drones and Israel intensifying their belligerence by bombing inside Qatar, those aren't even the most recent incidents now that Russian jets have entered NATO airspace in Estonia and Israel has launched a new attack on Gaza City while Netanyahu says he wants Israel ...

Air Date 9/16/2025

Between recent Labor Day rallies and Republican Town Hall meetings, we're seeing that resistance to Trump's deeply unpopular policies is alive and well. Plus we're going to look at some historical legacies of resistance movements that can both inform and inspire us today.

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Air Date 9/11/2025

I've always learned the high-level understanding that the Nazis were partly able to come to power because the opposition at the time was too caught up with infighting to create a coherent resistance. With hindsight, it's easy to lament how badly they miscalculated the circumstances but living through the modern day and watching the Democratic Party struggle gives even more clarity to how that kind of inability to...

Air Date 9/7/2025

Trump has been setting a new tone both at home and abroad which is shaking up everything from the war in Ukraine to threats of force against Mexico, Venezuela, and our own American cities with the militarization of domestic policing. And we made all of this before Trump posted an Apocalypse Now meme about using the Department of War against Chicago.

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Air Date: 9–3-25

Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:

• Ch. 1 - The surprising origins of Gerrymandering

• Ch. 2 - The options we have to improve congressional representation for everyone in the country

• Ch. 3 - Democratic states response to Republican gerrymandering threats

• Ch. 4 - The argument for DC statehood and the people to blame for why it hasn’t happened yet

• Ch. 5 - How to end home...

Air Date: 6–20-2023

Today, we take a look at the story of how neoliberalism was born, how corporations were organized to help push it into the mainstream, and how the courts were reshaped to permanently tilt the rules in favor of corporate power.

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Full Show Notes

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Air Date 9/1/2025

The way people consume almost every variety of media, entertainment, and art is different now than it was only 10-15 years ago. That means that the way protest music, revolutionary art, and even mass market productions and performances are going to be different, feel different, and likely find you in different ways than in the past. But the drive to create never dies and art will always...

Air Date: 8–28-25

Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:

• Ch. 1 - How scientific empires fall
• Ch. 2 - How fascists of the past have destroyed their country’s scientific progress in fear of inconvenient truths
• Ch. 3 - How other countries are taking the opportunity to poach American scientists
• Ch. 4 - Living in a society that is shifting away from believing in evidence based science
• Ch. 5 - The 1938 pro-science manifesto th...

Air Date 8/27/2025

RFK Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement aren't completely wrong about everything, they often identify the larger structural problems with the US health industrial complex even if their proposed solutions are wildly off the mark. But the problem they failed to see coming when partnering with Trump and the Republicans is that they're only going to be allowed to misguidedly defu...

Air Date 8/24/2025

The nature of politics and public policy is that there's always a need to balance opposing interests. Almost nowhere is there a more intractable set of opposing interests than in the attempt to protect children from harmful content on the internet while maintaining free access to adults, particularly because people wildly disagree about what qualifies as harmful and what degree of privacy invasion is an acceptabl...

Air Date 8/20/2025

There's been a faction of conservatives who have been trying to instill king-like powers into the presidency for a long time, so it shouldn't be surprising that Trump is getting so much help from the packed court and the apparatchiks in the states who are more than happy to turn their precious federalism on its head as long as their king is in charge.

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Air Date: 8–19-25

Today, Jay!, Amanda, Deon, and Erin discuss:

• Ch.1 - The Trump administration’s unprecedented attempts to get your data from the states
• Ch. 2 - Why Trump’s new private health tracking system is a wolf in sheep’s clothing
• Ch. 3 - How HIV patients suffering in the 80s, 90s and early 00s from constant health data breaches is a hint of what could come
• Ch. 4 - Why a new UK law trying to protect children from seeing...

Air Date 8/16/2025

There's the old Douglas Adams quote stating that, "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job" which is a good general rule to live by. But then there are the real baddies, those would-be leaders who possess one or more of the dark triad of traits that spells real doom for the societies that elevate them to power: narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavel...

Air Date 8/12/2025

The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! This month, we're covering the full spectrum of authoritarian threats—military in the streets, surveillance in our phones, conspiracies in our feeds, and corruption at the top—before turning to the grassroots organizers and Democratic Socialists who are building the resistance and winning.

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Air Date: 8–10-25

Today, Jay!, Amanda, and Deon (Erin was on vacation!) discuss:

• How modern fascism does not look like the jarring and brutal images people think of, and the “rituals of conformity” in Nazi Germany that remind us of another era we’ve lived through
• How despotism affects the citizen psyche and how to counter those effects
• The importance of countering Orwellian language under fascism
• Advice on living under authori...