Black Lives Matter had massive victories in the elections in America’s biggest county—L.A., with 10 million people.  They elected a progressive D.A. and passed an initiative to re-imagine public safety by moving 10 per cent of the county’s $5 billion unrestricted budget to alternatives to incarceration, to community services, and barring the county from using the money on prisons, jails or law enforcement agencies.  Jody Armour explains – his new book is “N*gga Theory: Race, Language, Unequal Justice, and the Law."

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Joan Walsh looks at Trump’s support, and finds it shocking that he did about as well as last time, despite everything that he’s done in the last four years, culminating in the disaster of the pandemic response and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.  She concludes that too much of our country consists of racists who prefer white supremacy to equality. 

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Maybe the election next week will have a big enough vote for Biden so that it can’t be challenged in court;  maybe the Republicans won’t dispute the outcome.  But maybe they will – we’ve had other disputed elections in our history --of course we had the Supreme Court stopping the count in Florida in 2000, and there was another one, much less well known–the election of 1876.  Historian Eric Foner explains.

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Talking politics, and history, with Sherrod Brown.  Of course he’s the senior senator from Ohio, first elected in 2006.  He was re-elected in 2018- he won by 7 points--in a state Hillary Clinton had lost -- by 8 points -- just 2 years earlier.  He talks about how he did that, and how Biden has learned the lessons of that campaign. 

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The new Aaron Sorkin film, “Trial of the Chicago 7,” opened on Netflix this past weekend.  Of course it’s about the 1969 trial of leaders of the antiwar movement, including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Rennie Davis--and we have Rennie Davis as a guest.  He was the New Left’s most talented organizer, and he talks about the film and the real history of those protests--and also politics today.

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Cell-phone videos of police killing Black people have had such an immense political impact over the last couple of years. Allissa Richardson comments on the new protest journalism, which is based largely on Twitter.  Her new book is “Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism.”

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Also: Ari Berman talks about voting rights and Republican vote suppression, about the voter protection efforts of the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party, and their plans to counter Trump’s plans to steal the election, and about recent Supreme Court decisions on voting rights cases. 

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Remember the days of the hashtag “Free Melania”?  Remember how we said she was a hostage in the White House?  Now there’s a book that says we were all wrong about that - Katha Pollitt talks about Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s “tell-not-quite-all,” Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady.  

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How climate change is forcing migration out of low lying coastal areas: Sonia Shah reports on what happened in the Bahamian island of Abaco after Hurricane Dorian last September—and what we need to do now about migration forced by climate change.  Sonia is an award-winning reporter; her new book is The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. 

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A new episode

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