Note: We are back from parental leave! This episode was originally released January 27th for Death Panel patrons and is being unlocked today for the first time. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Beatrice speaks with Jess Whatcott about the ideological links between incarceration and eugenics, how policies like immigration detention are a form of population control, and their new book, Menace to the Future: A Disabi...
May 08, 2025•1 hr 8 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/128245289 Beatrice speaks with Nathan Tankus to walk through an oral history of the early months of DOGE's ongoing infiltration of the Treasury payments system and Social Security, why the "Trump-Musk Payments Crisis" threatens a bigger fundamental threat of US economic breakdown than even Trump's tariffs, and why Nathan tried (and failed) to crash the stock market. Runtime 2:36:28 Note: W...
May 04, 2025•38 min
Note: We are back from parental leave! This episode was originally released May 18th, 2023. We are re-airing it today to celebrate May Day, as Artie explains in a brief intro at the top of the episode. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Original description: Beatrice speaks with Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes about their book Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Transcript: https:...
Apr 30, 2025•1 hr 35 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/127684119 Beatrice speaks with Vicky Osterweil about some of the major events that happened during our parental leave—from Trump’s kidnapping of protesters for political speech to the proposed autism registry—and what the first months of Trump’s second term tell us about the administration’s particular approach to fascism. Note: We're back! Thank you to everyone for all the well wishes and...
Apr 28, 2025•20 min
Note: We are back from parental leave! This episode was originally released August 22nd, 2024. We are re-airing it today in light of New York Governor Kathy Hochul's ongoing push to force a mask ban through New York state budget negotiations, as Artie explains in a brief intro at the top of the episode. Please note that the county-level mask ban discussed in this episode was implemented last year; as we discussed in our episode Covid Year Five, within a week of implementation the law was used to...
Apr 23, 2025•1 hr 33 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/127162993 Beatrice speaks with Dean Spade about holding together political coalitions, friendships, and organizing partnerships in the face of a culture of disposability and a world on fire. Note: We're back! Thank you to everyone for all the well wishes and many kind messages during our parental leave. We have a lot coming together soon processing current events and reacting to some big d...
Apr 21, 2025•19 min
This episode was originally released for patrons on February 10th, and we are unlocking it today as threats to cut Medicaid and Social Security have only grown louder and more explicit since it was recorded (and as our central comments on the nature of "waste, fraud and abuse" rhetoric remain, unfortunately, enduringly relevant). We're back from our parental leave (!) next Monday in the patron feed with new episodes, and will certainly be picking up where this conversation left off very soon. To...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 33 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/126650833 Beatrice speaks with Kareem Rabie about how capitalist visions for “the day after” ceasefire often rely on economic development projects that act as an extension of settler colonialism, Rabie’s research on housing development projects in the West Bank in 2005-2009, and his 2021 book, Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the W...
Apr 14, 2025•20 min
Beatrice and Phil speak with lifelong activist William Bronston about his experiences trying to take down the infamous Willowbrook institution from within as a young doctor, his appeal to replace “long term care” with “lifetime care," and how his work towards deinstitutionalization informs his ongoing advocacy for single payer healthcare. Transcript: https://www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/lifetime-care-dr-william-bronston This episode was originally released for patrons on August 28th, 2023, as ...
Apr 09, 2025•1 hr 20 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/126159598 Beatrice speaks with Micah Khater about her award winning article on the intersection of race, disability, and incarceration in the southern US in the early 20th century, and her work documenting the history of how Black women experienced and theorized disability from within Alabama prisons. Read Micah’s full article, “No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical Epis...
Apr 07, 2025•18 min
Beatrice speaks with Victoria Law about how prisons and jails have acted as vectors of covid transmission throughout the pandemic, the experiences of people on the inside from early in the pandemic through fights happening now over long covid in incarcerated people, and why it’s still not too late to bring back a common demand from 2020: to free them all for public health. This episode was originally released for patrons on September 9th, 2024, as Artie explains in a brief note at the top of the...
Apr 02, 2025•2 hr
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/125620040 Beatrice and Phil speak with legal scholars Karen Tani and Katie Eyer about how the Supreme Court used cases related to disability and deinstitutionalization in the 1970s and 1980s as an opportunity to remake and expand its own powers, the role that these cases had in securing conservatives’ “New Federalism” revolution, and how disability cases continue to be a site of conservati...
Mar 31, 2025•17 min
Beatrice speaks with William Boyd about how “risk assessment” became a central focus of health safety and environmental law since the 1970s, and how the political and economic factors that structure how those risks are assessed have resulted in law and policy far less likely to protect against environmental and health hazards. This episode was originally released for patrons on August 5th, 2024, as Artie explains in a brief note at the top of the show. To support the show and help make episodes ...
Mar 26, 2025•1 hr 20 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/125073251 Beatrice speaks with Sunaura Taylor about how industrial pollution and systemic abandonment produce networks of disability among people, animals, and what she calls “injured landscapes;” how one community in Arizona organized against longstanding environmental pollution from arms manufacturing; and her new book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. Find Sunaura’s bo...
Mar 24, 2025•36 min
Beatrice and Tracy speak with Marques Vestal about the history of political conflicts over eviction and property in Los Angeles, the role of removal in producing property value, and using history to help us tell new stories about the past to shape our present. This episode was originally released for patrons on December 9th, 2024, as Artie explains in a brief note at the top of the show. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpa...
Mar 19, 2025•1 hr 34 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/124584385 Hi listeners — Beatrice and Artie are currently on parental leave. (We were planning to be able to telegraph the announcement more this week, but "baby death panel" had other plans, and came early!). While we're away, we'll still have episodes in the feed, like today's episode; a mix of some old favorites we haven't revisited in a while and some unlocks. We’ll be back as soon as ...
Mar 17, 2025•8 min
Bea, Artie, and Phil discuss the pervasive, perennial myth that the Medicare and Social Security trust funds are on the brink of imminent collapse, a myth that feeds austerity in policymaking and false panic that the programs "won't be around" when younger generations grow old--and that Trump and Musk's DOGE are currently taking advantage of to press for cuts. This episode was originally released for patrons on April 17, 2023, as Artie explains in a brief note at the top of the show. To support ...
Mar 13, 2025•1 hr 20 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/124065295 Hi listeners — Beatrice and Artie are currently on parental leave. (We were planning to be able to telegraph the announcement more this week, but "baby death panel" had other plans, and came early!). While we're away, we'll still have episodes in the feed, like today's episode; a mix of some old favorites we haven't revisited in a while and some unlocks. We’ll be back as soon as ...
Mar 10, 2025•20 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/death-classic-of-123573664 Hi listeners — Beatrice and Artie are currently on parental leave. (We were planning to be able to telegraph the announcement more this week, but "baby death panel" had other plans, and came early!). While we're away, we'll still have episodes in the feed, like today's episode; a mix of some old favorites we haven't revisited in a while and some unlocks. We’ll be...
Mar 05, 2025•6 min
Hi listeners — Beatrice and Artie are currently on parental leave. (We were planning to be able to telegraph the announcement more this week, but "baby death panel" had other plans, and came early!). While we're away, we'll still have episodes in the feed, like today's episode; a mix of some old favorites we haven't revisited in a while and some unlocks. We’ll be back as soon as it’s safe and reasonable for us to do so, because with everything going on right now we want to make sure we’re here f...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 34 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/123023212 Beatrice speaks with Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson about care work and parenting as part of abolitionist practice, lessons from integrating abolitionist values into everyday life, and how we show up for each other in dark times like these. Find Kim and Maya’s book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2446-we-grow-the-w...
Feb 24, 2025•24 min
Beatrice speaks with Sophie Lewis about the history of “fascist feminisms,” what this history can tell us about the current state of US politics, and the need to embrace more radical and liberatory forms of feminism. Sophie’s new book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation is out this week from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2440-enemy-feminisms Find our book Health Communism here: www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-communism Find Jules' new bo...
Feb 20, 2025•1 hr 27 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/122511116 With RFK’s Senate confirmation complete, hearings for Kennedy’s handpicked agency heads like Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary loom. In preparation, Beatrice speaks with Dr. Jonathan Howard—himself a frequent subject of both Bhattacharya and Makary’s scorn—about both of their records on the pandemic, their claims that criticism of their work amounts to “censorship” and “attacks o...
Feb 17, 2025•21 min
This episode was originally released for patrons on December 23rd, 2024. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod We present our 2024 year in review, taking a look back at the last year in the ongoing social and political consequences of normalizing the covid pandemic and rushing to bring the federal covid response to a close. Full Transcript: https://www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/covid-year-five Find our book Health Com...
Feb 13, 2025•4 hr 10 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121974390 Beatrice, Artie and Phil discuss how Trump and Musk’s DOGE increasingly seems poised to go after Medicare and Social Security, how the constant refrain that Republicans are looking to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” in social spending is a lie meant to obscure their real agenda, and why the open plot to add work requirements to Medicaid would be a tremendous disaster. Get Health Com...
Feb 11, 2025•21 min
Beatrice and Jules speak with Melissa Gira Grant about the Trump administration’s anti-trans executive orders in the context of their broader attack on “wokeness” and DEI. We discuss what the broader impact of these orders could be, what elements are a retread of longstanding rightwing attacks on trans life, and what parts of them seem like a new and evolved form of attack. Read Melissa's piece "Why Are Hospitals Bowing to Trump’s Illegal Gender-Affirming Care Ban?" here: https://newrepublic.com...
Feb 06, 2025•1 hr 48 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121450929 Beatrice, Artie and Phil discuss the Trump administration’s early and sweeping power grab: freezing government spending, infiltrating the systems that distribute federal payments throughout the US, and dramatically cutting off science research and funding. We explain what’s going on and why, and how each of these actions represents the new administration’s self-professed intentio...
Feb 03, 2025•15 min
This episode was originally released for patrons on November 18th, 2024 and we're unlocking it today with a new introduction in response to this week's RFK confirmation hearings in the Senate. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Beatrice and Artie discuss Trump’s nomination of prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency overseeing healthcare, infectious ...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 29 min
Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/120917942 Beatrice speaks with Jess Whatcott about the ideological links between incarceration and eugenics, how policies like immigration detention are a form of population control, and their new book, Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics. Get Health Communism here: www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-communism Find Jules' new book here: https://www.v...
Jan 27, 2025•17 min
Beatrice and Tracy discuss how the situation in Los Angeles has evolved since last week, and speak with organizers in Los Angeles who have stepped up during the fires to support people the state has left behind. In Part Two, we speak with organizers from the LA Tenants Union's South Central Local, KtownForAll, and Union de Vecinos, the Eastside Local of the LA Tenants Union. Links to organizations mentioned in the episode: Find LA Tenant Union (LATU) here: https://latenantsunion.org/ Donate to K...
Jan 22, 2025•1 hr 30 min
