Ron DeSantis has written a political autobiography, “The Courage to be Free.” The Nation's DC Bureau Chief, Chris Lehmann calls it “a paranoid rant disguised as campaign memoir.” Chris joins us on this episode of Start Making Sense to discuss it. Also: Sunday is Oscar night in America and, as usual, we have a lot of complaints about the nominations. So does John Powers, Critic at Large on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross . We talk about this year’s films we didn’t like – and some we thought were...
Mar 08, 2023•37 min
The ongoing defamation suit launched by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News for its coverage of the 2020 election has already resulted in the release of an eye-opening tranche of documents that give an unprecedented window into the inner workings of the TV network. As National columnist Chris Lehmann has noted , the major revelation is how completely beholden the network is to its right-wing base, to the extent of knowingly pushing false stories to please that audience. On this episode of T...
Mar 07, 2023•32 min
Israel’s new far-right government, headed, again, by Benjamin Netanyahu, is working to undermine democracy for Israelis and advance Israel’s annexation of Palestinian land. Provocations by Israel in the West Bank have been followed by settler pogroms against Palestinian villages. Saree Makdisi provides comment and analysis of how Israel is “destroying the fantasies of liberal Zionism.” https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-liberal-zionism/ Also: the worst thing that happened to Black Hi...
Mar 01, 2023•36 min
The most important election of 2023 is in Wisconsin next month, where voters can change the state's supreme court and end domination by conservatives. They’ve banned abortion and enforced the worst gerrymandering in the nation. John Nichols joins the show to talk about the results of Tuesday's primary, which look good for Democrats. Also on this week's episode: COVID remains the number 3 cause of death in the US, after heart disease and cancer, with almost 3,000 deaths every week. However, Biden...
Feb 22, 2023•33 min
Black history, banned in Florida—and excluded from the College Board’s recommended AP Black Studies course. UCLA professor Robin Kelley will comment on that – he’s one of the historians whose work has been targeted. Also: "The 1619 Project" on Hulu. Also: the Royal Family and “The Crown”– you know, Queen Elizabeth and Charles and Diana, and the Netflix series about them. Gary Younge explains why he loathes the monarchy in Britain, but loved “The Crown” on Netflix. Advertising Inquiries: https://...
Feb 15, 2023•37 min
“The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation”—that’s QAnon’s crazy idea, and 30 million Americans say they mostly agree. Chris Lehmann comments. Also: Fintan O’Toole’s personal history of Ireland since the fifties: how a country dominated by a corrupt Catholic church came to legalize gay marriage and abortion -- by referendum. His much-honored ‘personal history’ of Ireland, titl...
Feb 08, 2023•40 min
House Republicans are refusing to raise the debt limit, threatening that the US will default on its bond payments. But the Constitution has the solution for President Biden -- that’s what historian Eric Foner says. He joins the podcast to shed light on a little-known section of the 14th Amendment. Also on this episode, we’re still thinking about Victor Navasky, who died on Jan. 23. He was editor or publisher of The Nation for 27 years, starting in 1978, and author of several books, including one...
Feb 01, 2023•30 min
Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona senator who quit the Democratic Party in December, is up for reelection next year, and will be challenged by progressive Democrat Ruben Gallego. Steve Phillips points to evidence that her chances of reelection are poor. His new book, “How We Win the Civil War,” has a chapter on Arizona politics. Also: What if government provided a basic income to all residents? Something like $1000 a month? How much could that change inequality and poverty? Sasha Abramsky reports on t...
Jan 25, 2023•38 min
Abortion rights voters are reshaping politics in the coming political season—starting with a special election to the Virginia State Senate. Also: the most important election of 2023 is for the open seat on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. John Nichols explains. Also: Walmart is the biggest employer in America, and the Walton family, the children of Walmart founder Sam Walton, is the richest family in the world. The company has raised wages and become more socially conscious-but it provides a c...
Jan 18, 2023•33 min
If you were planning a future coup, what could you learn from the failure of Trump’s efforts on January 6? Fintan O’Toole says it would need a better story – not attacking Congress, but “defending democracy.” He teaches at Princeton, and is the author most recently of We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. Also: Who’d want to see a movie about Harvey Weinstein? But the film “She Said,” about the two New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story, is not abo...
Jan 11, 2023•35 min
Teaching Assistants and other grad student employees at the University of California won a historic victory in their strike last month. What does that mean for other universities and other union organizing campaigns? Nelson Lichtenstein joins the show to comment. Also this week, Andrew Bacevich talks about our “very long war” going back to the sixties, and the relative insignificance of Donald Trump. Bacevich's new book is On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century . ...
Jan 04, 2023•32 min
For our end-of year show, we are featuring a couple of our favorite book segments from 2022. First, a Black guy’s guide to the Constitution: Elie Mystal explains why “our constitution is not good.” He’s The Nation ’s justice correspondent and author of Allow Me to Retort . Also: “Bad Mexicans”—that’s what the revolutionaries of 1910 were called as they fought on both sides of the US-Mexico border against the robber barons and their political allies. UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez tells tha...
Dec 28, 2022•34 min
The biggest strike in the country this year, and the biggest in the history of American universities, may be over. After five weeks of picketing and protests, the union representing 48,000 graduate student employees at the University of California announced a settlement. The university made an offer, and union members are voting this week. Nelson Lichtenstein has the analysis. He teaches History at UC Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. We also...
Dec 21, 2022•40 min
The Democrats triumphed in Arizona this November, electing the governor and the secretary of state, and reelecting senator Mark Kelly --in what used to be a red state. But then Senator Kyrsten Sinema quit the Democratic Party, and Progressives moved towards a primary election to challenge her. On this week's podcast, Steve Phillips explains how the victories happened, and what's to be done about Sinema. Also on this episode of Start Making Sense– the largest strike in the nation entered its fift...
Dec 14, 2022•31 min
On this episode of the Start Making Sense podcast, Nation correspondent, Joan Walsh, comments on Democratic incumbent, Senator Raphael Warnock beating Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff, and what that means for the future of American politics. Also on this episode, the largest strike in the country this year, and the largest in the history of higher education, entered its fourth week at the University of California. Historian Nelson Lichtenstein joins the show to discuss. Advertising Inquirie...
Dec 07, 2022•33 min
We know a lot about the bad things J. Edgar Hoover did, but it turns out there’s a lot we didn’t know. Historian Beverly Gage joins the podcast to explain. Her new book is “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover & the Making of the American Century.” Also: Should the Supreme Court base its decision on what it can discern about the original intent of the framers? That’s what the “originalists” say – and they dominate today’s court. Erwin Chemerinsky comments. Chemerinsky is dean of the law school at UC Berke...
Nov 30, 2022•39 min
Hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought here by their undocumented parents since 2007 are not eligible for DACA. But now they may be eligible for jobs--at the University of California. UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham explains. Also: the fight against pollution in LA’s port communities, where 300,000 people, mostly Latino, live next door to oil refineries, chemical facilities, and one of the largest oilfields in the nation. For decades they’ve been fighting for basic rights and a...
Nov 23, 2022•33 min
The Georgia Senate runoff campaign has begun--Joan Walsh has just returned from Atlanta, and explains why Trump’s candidate Herschel Walker seems likely to lose. Also: comment on what happened in Stacey Abrams’ tragic loss. Plus: in Los Angeles the terrible sheriff has lost his re-election campaign. Gustavo Arellano, the LA Times columnist, comments, and reports on how the billionaire developer running for mayor campaigned for the Latino vote. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands ...
Nov 16, 2022•37 min
The Nation's political writers analyze the good, the bad, and the ugly in the midterms, and find keys to building a winning coalition for 2024. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Nov 09, 2022•33 min
How can we save democracy from white nationalism and right-wing authoritarianism? Steve Phillips argues we need to organize and turn out the millions of non-voters – people of color and young people – with a long-term, data-based strategy. Steve’s new book is “How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good.” Also: a story about Black landownership, starting in Piney Woods, North Carolina, one of the oldest examples of uninterrupted land ownership b...
Nov 02, 2022•37 min
Stacey Abrams, running for governor in Georgia, is behind in the polls of likely voters, which the pollsters define as people who vote regularly, especially in the last midterms, four years ago. But her whole strategy is to organize and mobilize people who do NOT vote regularly – to expand the electorate with young people, people of color, and those the political scientists call “low-propensity voters.” She explains in this interview, from April, 2019, after her first campaign for governor. Also...
Oct 26, 2022•38 min
What will Republicans do if they win control of the House in the midterms? Now they’ve said something about that, officially: they call it their “Commitment to America.” Chris Lehmann calls it “a grab bag of cultural resentments papering over an anemic policy wish list.” Also: The Trump years are not the only time American democracy has been threatened; the World War One years, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was president, were another. That’s what Adam Hochschild argues –his new book is “American...
Oct 19, 2022•35 min
Joe Biden has just made marijuana legalization a campaign issue--the Democrats should run with it, says John Nichols. Also: Greil Marcus talks about Bob Dylan, from "Blowin' in the Wind" to "Murder Most Foul." He has a new book out, it's called "Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in 7 Songs." Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
Oct 12, 2022•32 min
Nurses have taken the lead in the wave of this year’s labor activism. The largest private-sector nurses’ strike in American history took place recently in Minnesota – 15,000 nurses walked off the job for three days in the Twin Cities and the Twin Ports. Other nurses threatened strikes in half a dozen other places. Bryce Covert reports a key front in the fight for better health care in America . Plus: Dahlia Lithwick talks about some of the heroes of the Trump years: the women lawyers who fought ...
Oct 05, 2022•40 min
Can Republicans win control of the Senate? Trump’s candidates are the GOP's biggest problem, starting in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. The Nation 's National Affairs Correspondent, John Nichols has our analysis. Also on this week's episode of the Start Making Sense podcast, a discussion about Ken Burns' new documentary on PBS, “The US and the Holocaust.” Historian David Nasaw comes on the show to discuss why the film may be the most politically engaged and relevant work of Burns...
Sep 28, 2022•33 min
Should Bernie Sanders run in the Democratic primaries in 2024? President of The Nation, Bhaskar Sunkara says “yes” IF Biden doesn’t. Sanders transformed American politics and, Bhaskar argues, he remains a uniquely important figure for Democrats and the left. Also: 20 years before the January 6 attack on the capitol, a Republican mob attacked a central hub of government operations claiming the vote count in the presidential election that year was fraudulent, trying to reverse the results. That wa...
Sep 21, 2022•34 min
The transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention into a powerful right wing political force developed over the last 50 years. Before 1973, when abortion became a constitutional right, the Southern Baptists did not have a political position on abortion. Then came what they call the “conservative resurgence”—we call it the “fundamentalist takeover.” Sarah Posner explains that history. Her book “Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy T...
Sep 14, 2022•38 min
Remember how Kansas was the first state to vote directly on abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and how Kansans surprised everyone by voting to keep abortion rights in the constitution, 59%-41%? Amy Littlefield went to Kansas to report on the election for The Nation and see how the victory had been organized and won. Also on this week's episode, we’re still thinking about Barbara Ehrenreich, who died last week. She was one of our best. We’ll listen to an interview with Ehrenreich fr...
Sep 07, 2022•36 min
Republicans are making plans if they win control of the House in November--Chris Lehmann reports that their top targets include the NLRB and the Department of Labor. Chris is The Nation’s new D.C. Bureau Chief. Also: Patrick Leahy of Vermont has been a senator for almost 50 years. He describes how, on January 6, when senators took refuge from the mob attacking the capitol, they prepared to complete the work of counting the electoral votes in their underground bunker--until he insisted they shoul...
Aug 31, 2022•34 min
The Mar-a-Lago raid by the FBI put Donald Trump back at the center of American politics, just before the midterms. Is that good for the Democrats? John Nichols comments. Also: Dirty work—and the people who do it: the low-income workers who do our most ethically troubled jobs. What does that have to do with the rest of us? Eyal Press explains—his book “Dirty Work” is out now in paperback. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
Aug 24, 2022•37 min
