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

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! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal...

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 obvious facts about what reduces recidivism, and an article on the community "solutionaries"...

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 Libro.fm for a non-evil book...

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 bestoftheleft.01, or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members...

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 BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus Shows + No Ads!) ...

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 Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message...

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 Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus...

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 authoritarian rule suffer from the lack of benefits that comes with the free exchange of ideas. Full Show...

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 bestoftheleft.01, or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com BestOfTheLeft.com/Support...

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 Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus Shows + No Ads!) Use...

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 experience! Jo...

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 bestoftheleft.01, or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com<...

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 Show Notes <...

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 real security comes from connection, not threats. At home, the administration revives the red sc...

Air Date: 7/22/2026 Today we look at how three things Europe thought were features turned out to be leverage that could be held against them: American military protection, Silicon Valley software, and cheap Chinese goods. From a French government office running Linux to a secret European defense coalition that bypasses Washington, Europe is quietly swapping out the old architecture rather than dismantling it, one operating system migration and one secret war game at a time. Full Show Notes Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal...

Air Date: 7/18/2026 Today we examine recent primary elections and how the political smear of crying 'socialism' has been dusted off and aimed at a new generation of candidates. What's changed is that the people being smeared are actually winning elections, and the more the establishment called them dangerous, the stronger their numbers got. 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!) <...

Re-Air Date: 7-14-2026 Original Air Date: 6-7-2024 Banning abortion is wildly unpopular and also one of the primary motivators for the group most strongly supporting the Republican Party and Donald Trump, the Christian Right, which has transformed both the party and politicians into extremists made in their own image, threatening the lives and health of millions and sacrificing democracy in the process. Direct Download Transcript Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com<...

Air Date: 7/10/2026 Today we look at what it means to live in an economy that has quietly split in two with a soaring stock market driven by AI on one side, a collapsing job market on the other, and the subtle shift in the right to own things, from your music and movies to your car's software, which all underlie the slide toward technofeudalism. 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 <...

Air Date: 7/7/2026 Today we use the 2026 World Cup to pull everything that runs under the game up into the light. Nearly a quarter of the players are representing a country other than the one they were born in, praised as national heroes when they score but scorned as foreigners when they lose. The history of colonialism built the machinery that turns immigrants into targets, and the results are playing out live around this year's tournament, in the towns that throw their arms open and the borders that slam shut, in who a country will claim and who...

Air Date: 7/4/2026 Today we examine what America has celebrated for 250 years and what it keeps refusing to look at. The Declaration promised government by the consent of the governed, but the Constitution protected slavery, concentrated power in elites, and left the definition of "the people" deliberately vague. Every generation inherits that same unresolved contradiction and has to address it for themselves. 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...