The Dig

The man who carried out the massacre in Pittsburgh was apparently motivated by a belief that Jewish people were conspiring to destroy the white race by way of orchestrating mass immigration. It's a conspiracy theory with deep roots in America's violent white power movement and that today is echoed by Trump and Fox News. Dan interviews Kathleen Belew on her book Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, a history of the white power revolutionary movement from 1975-1995. Thanks to Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out the excellent titles they have for sale at www.versobooks.com and www.ucpress.edu Please support this podcast with money at patreon.com/TheDig

Historian Howard Zinn remains a model for left-wing intellectuals who want to not only convey ideas to a public beyond academia but also take action to transform the world that it is their profession to explain. Dan interviews Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor, a leading intellectual of today's resurgent socialist left, on her foreword to a new edition of Zinn's autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

The brutality of the Saudi royal family had been hiding in plain sight. It was an open secret convenient to the political, media and business elites for whom the Kingdom means big business and an invaluable geostrategic proxy. But the brutal murder and dismemberment of a single Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, has forced Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman and his American enablers onto the defensive as the regime's brutal war on Yemen, global support for Salafist fundamentalism, and kleptocratric repression have suddenly been subjected to intense public scrutiny. Dissident scholar Madawi al-Rasheed explains the history and political-economy of Saudi Arabia, and the now-frustrated efforts at obfuscation mounted by bin Salman and his allies. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Recently, Dan spoke to Nikhil Pal Singh about the unfortunate and never-ending debate over whether it was economics or racism that got Trump elected. This is a sequel to that discussion: because what Malaika Jabali powerfully exposes in a Current Affairs piece combining on-the-ground reporting in Milwaukee and historical and data analysis is that when we talk about the impact of economic crisis on Trump's victory, the condition of Black poor and working-class people—many of whom decided to stay home on election day—must be at its center. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Jacobin Managing Editor Micah Uetricht pulls Dave-Davies-duty for Dan and interviews Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez, a DSA member running for alderwoman in Chicago. Rodríguez-Sanchez moved to Chicago from Puerto Rico, where the brutal austerity imposed on the island made her job as a teacher impossible. She has brought with her a radical tradition and a program to fight for the city's beleaguered public schools, for renters and for immigrant rights, and for a public safety agenda that prioritizes social workers over cops. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of radical titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

CORRECT EPISODE NOW POSTED. Today's episode is on the alarming new report out from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and how it is that William Nordhaus—an economist whose work is dedicated to arguing that that it would be too inefficient to address the ecological crisis aggressively and urgently—recently won the discipline's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Dan speaks to Alyssa Battisoni, a PhD candidate in political science and member of Jacobin's editorial board. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing books at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at www.patreon.com/TheDig

Socialist Alternative's Kshama Sawant was elected to Seattle City Council way before socialism became a cool thing. Today, Dan's talking to Sawant about how socialists can build power and win at the local level—and how in Seattle, that mean...

Today, we’re addressing one of the most obnoxious corners of the identity politics debate. And that is the corner occupied by Right Liberals who believe that any desire to change the world is a divisive symptom of maladjusted affluenza emanating from pampered college students. Moira Weigel discusses her Guardian review of The Coddling of the American Mind, which makes its case by way of pragmatic folk aphorisms like: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing books at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with you money at patreon.com/TheDig

Let’s ensure that the history of American socialism doesn’t repeat as farce. That’s one reason that Max Elbaum wrote Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, an account of the little-remembered New Communist Movement that defined the American anti-capitalist Left of the 1970s. Their internationalism, anti-racism and cadre organization were in many ways admirable. Their dogmatism and sectarianism proved disastrous. Elbaum relates this history, and the lessons that the New Left failed to learn from the Old Left—lessons that today's resurgent left would be wise to study. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing titles, including Revolution in the Air, at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with MONEY at patreon.com/TheDig

Christine Blasey Ford and other women have revealed that our political-economic elite is pervaded by profound intimate violence, forms of brutal interpersonal domination that are the everyday and microcosmic connective tissue of systems of domination as a whole. Lisa Duggan offers her thoughts on how to link these individual stories that playing out at economic, political and celebrity peaks to the systems that order the world that the rest of us live in. Duggan also addresses carceral feminism and how "believe women" obscures the way that gender and sexuality are embedded in political and economic structures. Plus, she rethinks her controversial blog post about Avital Ronell in response to grad student critics. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing books at versobooks.com And please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

An interview with three members of Reclaim Philadelphia, which emerged from the Bernie 2016 campaign in Philly and has since—in a remarkably short amount of time—played a key role in getting Larry Krasner elected District Attorney, effectively won a state legislative seat, and taken over two Democratic Wards in the city. Much of the debate on the left over how to engage in electoral politics revolves around how to relate to the inside and outside of electoral politics as they currently exist: in other words, how to approach the unfortunate reality of the Democratic Party. Reclaim Philadelphia brings an outsider perspective and base to a hard-nosed insider game. Nikil Saval, Rick Krajewski and Amanda Mcillmurray explain what they do and how they do it.Thanks to Verso Books. Peruse their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Serious people in Washington are seduced by vapid and self-serving accounts of their savvy operation of the machinery of government—works like Bob Woodward's latest exercise in extended stenography Fear: Trump in the White House. The problem with Trump—for defenders of the establishment political order that helped make his presidency possible—is precisely that he's not a man like John McCain, a bloodthirsty and world-historically successful self-mythologizer. Patrick Blanchfield on his review of Fear in n+1 and obituary of John McCain in The Baffler. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their massive collective of left-wing books at versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

The United States today exceeds at perpetually waging wars that it are destined to fail to meet their purported objectives. The War on Terror is one such war. The War on Drugs is another. In both cases, failure never leads to much official questioning of the war let alone a repudiation of its underlying wisdom. The conventional wisdom is always that the war just hasn't been waged in the right way, or aggressively enough. My guest today is Leo Beletsky, who directs the Health in Justice Action Lab at at Northeastern University. He and Jeremiah Goulka recently published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the abolition of the DEA, noting that after hundreds of billions of dollars spent fatal overdose rates have skyrocketed to a historic high. Let's #AbolishDEA. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out a huge catalogue of excellent left-wing books at versobooks.com Please support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

For many, conservatives and liberals alike, Appalachia provides a skeleton key for interpreting changes in American politics that might otherwise be difficult to comprehend. But the way conservatives and liberals talk about Appalachia tells us a lot more about conservatives and liberals than it does about the region. Elizabeth Catte, the author of What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia, puts the region and representations of it in historical and political-economic context. Thanks to Verso Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com. And thanks to University of California Press, which just published Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century by Barbara Ransby ucpress.edu/book/9780520292710/making-all-black-lives-matter Support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig