Listen to Best of the Left Podcast Episodes

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…

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…

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…

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…

Air Date: 7/1/2026 Today we examine how four months of American bombardment accomplished what decades of diplomacy never could, making Iran, still run by oppressive theocrats, a regional superpower. An Iranian woman told a reporter she endured the bombing…

Air Date: 6/27/2026 Today we trace how one man went from receiving a $278 million government grant to becoming the world's first trillionaire who spent .025% of his wealth to get Trump elected, then used his position to slash programs that help people while…

Air Date: 6/24/2026 The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! If you've been pulling back from the news for your own sanity, this one's built for you — a quick recap and reference guide to the past month…

Air Date: 6–20-2026 Today we explore how political revenge became official government policy. The Department of Justice has dropped fraud cases while opening vindictive investigations into Trump's critics. Judges who rule against him face death threats at…

Air Date: 6/17/2026 Today we trace a pattern that repeated across half a dozen states this primary season: working-class candidates running on the cost of living beat the opponents party leadership hand-picked and funded. It looks like ordinary election news,…