Delete Your Account Podcast

Today we’re joined by writer and journalist Leslie Lee III, host of the left-wing arts and culture podcast Struggle Session, to take stock of the Bernie Sanders campaign thus far and the state of the Democratic primary race after another night of favorable results for Joe Biden. 

After filling listeners in on his own origin story and the birth of Struggle Session, Leslie breaks down the media narratives around overwhelming black support for Biden and the various premature postmortems on Bernie’s 2020 bid. The gang discusses the importance of taking heart from how far we’ve come since 2016, keeping up the momentum around Bernie’s agenda to the convention, and expanding the base for a socialist movement by organizing around specific issues, regardless of electoral outcomes. Finally, the crew rounds out the hour with an obligatory Star Wars segment. 

You can follow Leslie on Twitter @leslieleeiii and check out Struggle Session wherever pods are cast. 

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!!

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Kate Willett, comedian, writer, and co-host of the left-wing feminist podcast Reply Guys. Kate has also appeared in Netflix's “Comedy Lineup” and recently made her network debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Kate dives into how she broke out in comedy and what has helped define her left-wing bona fides, including the tragic passing of her boyfriend, comedian Raghav Mehta. 

We discuss her powerful essay for ELLE Magazine which explains just how Kate went from a Hillary Clinton fan to a quintessential Bernie Bro, and how canvassing for the Sanders campaign has helped her deal with the aftermath of losing Raghav.

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!!

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined from Jackson, Mississippi by veteran community organizers Pauline and Frederick Rogers. Pauline is President of the RECH Foundation or Reaching and Educating for Community Hope, and cofounder of that organization along with her husband Fred. Pauline and Frederick were both formerly incarcerated at Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm. Together they founded RECH as a prison and reentry ministry whose projects include the Wendy Hatcher Transitional Home and the Mississippi Freedom Letters Campaign in collaboration with historian and activist Garrett Felber, assistant professor of history the University of Mississippi and author of the book Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, out now from University of North Carolina Press. 

After Pauline and Fred share a bit of how their lives have been impacted by the prison system, they outline the broad range of services and advocacy they are able to engage in through the RECH Foundation. Pauline, Fred and Garrett discuss the deepening prison crisis in Mississippi, where 19 inmates have died in state prisons since the end of last year, most of them in the notorious Parchman facility. They explain why the Mississippi prison system and especially Parchman have a particular reputation for brutality, detailing both the history of the institution and the current conditions inmates endure. The crew ends by giving their assessment of state and federal government responses to the crisis as well as the double-edged sword of celebrity-driven media attention that has recently brought Parchman into the national spotlight. 

You can follow Pauline on Twitter @rechpauline, Garrett at @garrett_felber and learn more about everyone’s work at the RECH Foundation on their website. 

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!! 

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Briahna Joy Gray, National Press Secretary for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and co-host of the Hear The Bern podcast. After shedding light on her formative years before joining the Sanders campaign, Brie breaks down one of the most covered media narratives that has plagued the movement: the Bernie Bro myth. Brie unpacks the implications of this smear and explains just how diverse the Sanders coalition truly is. 

The gang then discusses the weaponization of identity politics by members of the liberal pundit class, and breaks down how Bernie Sanders' policy positions stack up with the other candidates still left on the field. We also get into the unique outreach tactics employed by Sanders canvassers who knocked on over 500,000 doors in the lead up to the Iowa caucus, and who appealed to the most disenfranchised communities in places like Ottumwa where Donald Trump had swept in 2016.

We also weigh up Mike Bloomberg's infiltration into the Democratic primary and what the Sanders campaign is focusing on to continue their winning streak through Super Tuesday.

You can follow Brie on Twitter @briebriejoy, listen to the campaign's official podcast on Hear The Bern, and keep up to date with the Sanders movement at berniesanders.com.

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!!

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Lana Polansky, a Montreal-based video game critic, designer and journalist whose writing has appeared on Vice, Paste, and Kill Screen, among other outlets. After charting her personal journey to the intersection of gaming and left-wing politics, Lana explains the experimental impulses behind the category of indie games, with the help of a series of essays for the digital arts and culture outlet Rhizome detailing how the concept of empathy has become a buzzword in the industry. 

Lana then gives listeners a lay of the land with respect to labor conditions for game workers and their efforts to organize, including her retrospective on Gamergate and the function of far-right cultural politics as worker suppression in a completely neoliberal industry, the new campaign by the Communications Workers of America in collaboration with Game Workers Unite to help unionize workers at game companies, and her own work with Game Curious Montreal, the “radical book club for games” bringing gaming enthusiasts together with local social justice organizers. 

You can follow Lana on Twitter @mechapoetic, tune in to her weekly Twitch streams at twitch.tv/mechapoetic, keep up with her independent work on her personal website sufficientlyhuman.com and her other other independent work at patreon.com/Lana Polansky. 

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!

In a momentous edition of Delete Your Account After Hours, Roqayah and Kumars welcome back our resident film and TV critic Sean T. Collins for our annual Oscar season roundup of the year’s best and worst movies and television, with an end of the decade twist. Sean writes for Rolling Stone and the New York Times among other outlets, and when last we heard from him, he was writing an essay every day of 2019 about Road House. This time, the gang discusses Sean’s new essay for The Outline on the character of Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars, the nominees for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, Sean’s top 5 TV shows of the decade, why no one is talking about Game of Thrones, and why horror is the undisputed top genre of 2010's entertainment. You can follow Sean on Twitter @theseantcollins, and find more of his writing on cinema and television at seantcollins.com.

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by returning guest Freddy Martinez, and Nathan "Nash" Sheard. Freddy is currently a policy analyst with the nonpartisan government accountability coalition Open The Government. Nash is an associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Freddy and Nash bring us up to speed on the explosive investigative report from the New York Times on the elusive facial recognition vendor, Clearview AI, which has scraped some three billion images for its database from social media platforms and sold them to law enforcement agencies for just $2,000 a month. We also explore the ways in which our personal information is being commodified and then sold back to as a part of wider surveillance capitalism; everything from the hottest security technology, like Ring, to software like Photoshop and everyday phone applications.

With help from Nash and Freddy, we unpack the feasibility of privacy legislation and how law enforcement organizations, like ICE, still manage to find legal ways to mine databases and use facial recognition technology with help from the world's leading tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

Finally, we learn about active campaigns like the ACLU's "Press Pause" initiative that intend to help control the surge of facial recognition software and why an outright ban on this technology may be the safest way to protect our privacy.

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Nima Shirazi is a NYC-based media critic and political analyst who edits the English-language Middle East news outlet Muftah and cohosts the podcast Citations Needed with friend of the show Adam Johnson. After sharing some choice tidbits about his formative years and political trajectory, Nima unpacks the ongoing saga surrounding the Iranian government’s accidental downing of a Ukrainian airliner during its military operation in retaliation for the Trump administration’s Jan. 3 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani.

The gang then discusses the fallout from Soleimani’s assassination, including the latest push for regime change and a rundown of the reactions from leading Democratic presidential candidates. Nima runs the gamut from growing up growing up as an Iranian American and rooting for the Iron Sheik, to the media’s demonization of Soleimani and branding of the Islamic Republic as a terrorist state, to a fresh wave of repression here at home, like the detention of Iranians (including US citizens) at the border as well as Facebook removing pro-Soleimani posts from Instagram under the pretense that they violate US sanctions.

You can follow Nima on Twitter @WideAsleepNima, keep up with his latest work on his website and over at Citations Needed.

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!! 

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined once again by Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson. Nathan is also a PhD student at Harvard University, a columnist for the Guardian, and author of the new book Why You Should Be a Socialist. After filling listeners in on what he’s been up to since his first appearance on the show, Nathan lays out his pitch in the book and a recent article for NBC News to readers who might be socialists, but don’t know it yet. 

Then the gang takes a deep dive into the political phenomenon of Pete Buttigieg, revisiting Nathan’s magnum opus on Buttigieg from early in his candidacy and expanding on it to cover his tenure as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, his consulting work for McKinsey & Company, his military service in Afghanistan, and his catastrophic record on racial issues. Finally, Nathan takes stock of the Buttigieg campaign’s momentum going forward and shares his take on the state of play in the Democratic primary. 

You can follow Nathan on Twitter @NathanJRobinson, read his work over on the Current Affairs website and pick up Why You Should Be a Socialist wherever books are still sold.

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!! 

Roqayah is off this week, so Kumars is joined by Madeline Peltz, a research coordinator at Media Matters for America where she covers the rise of the far right in conservative media and has emerged as the world’s foremost expert on Tucker Carlson. 

Madeline famously combed through the Fox News host’s weekly guest appearances from 2006 to 2011 on the talk radio program of C-list shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge, exposing a history of openly bigoted statements that put Carlson’s lingering prestige in media circles and the confusion surrounding his descent into fascism in their proper context. After catching listeners up on the history and mission of Media Matters, Madeline and Kumars dive deep into the utility of boycotting Fox News, the weirdest Fox commercials, how the network’s ideological project has evolved in the Trump era, and what makes “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” of all its offerings, uniquely dangerous. 

You can follow Madeline Peltz on Twitter @peltzmadeline and keep up with her work on the Media Matters website. 

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!