Listen to Best of the Left Podcast Episodes

Air Date: 10/27/2026 The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on the news from September and October without being overwhelming! Organized around a single idea: when something goes wrong, follow where the blame lands. Republicans staged a hearing…

Air Date: 10/23/2026 Today we look at the women's sports boom as a power story and explain how women's sports were held back on purpose, from England banning women's soccer for fifty years to colleges spending next to nothing on their women's teams, primarily…

Publish Date: 10/22/2026 Original Air Date: 4/6/2018 Today we look back to the spring of 2018, when a conservative listener called in looking for common ground on guns and we answered her point by point: the research on defensive gun use, who gets to be the…

Air Date: 10/17/2026 Today we look at how being poor in America is made harder on purpose. The hours of paperwork it takes to keep food assistance or Medicaid are there to shrink the programs quietly by attrition and make failure feel like a personal problem.…

Air Date: 10/13/2026 Today we look at rape culture as a system that contains far more than the crimes. This topic was prompted by the Cornell 7 story but it starts with little boys annoying girls and having it excused as affection, runs through the "nice guy"…

Publish Date: 10-11-2026 Original Air Date: 9-16-2014 Today we dig through the archives to give context to the news that the Pentagon plans to execute the Fort Hood shooter by firing squad, the first U.S. military execution in more than 60 years. Full Show…

Air Date: 10/7/2026 Today we trace the "Exxon Knew" story through a decade of our own archive, because that history is what the Supreme Court is weighing in Suncor v. Boulder in their first case this term. Exxon's scientists confirmed the climate science in…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…