Stress Test, from Mother Jones

Samantha Bee doesn’t think comedy will take Trump down. She calls her craft “impotent beyond belief” in the face of the daily presidential wrecking ball. But then, the creator and star of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee thinks preaching to the choir is absolutely fine—moral, even.“Talking to the people that you agree with is very good,” she tells Washington D.C. bureau chief David Corn, in this wide-ranging conversation recorded onstage at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. “I think it’s important to have as many voices as possible just go, ‘This is wrong. I disagree with this. This is how it should be. We’re not all crazy!”

When she started, Bee felt sure that airing just six episodes would result in the whole show being canceled for being too sharply opinionated. Now she thinks of her weekly, Emmy Award-winning (and just re-nominated) program—in its fifth season despite the pandemic—as “my own little historical record of this age.” It’s become a platform from which to educate, commiserate, and shock, with a panoply of facts, jokes, and mini-seminars about how the hell we got here and how to fix it. And she couldn’t care less if her critics call her an activist.“Look, when you have a show, you’ve got to do something with it,” she tells Corn. “To not use it to do something with it in a time of great distress feels like a huge waste to me. Why wouldn’t you?”

This interview, taped in February, is part of a limited series co-produced by Mother Jones and the Comedy Cellar, the venerable stand-up venue. Don’t miss Corn’s recent interviews with Debbie Harry and John Leguizamo by subscribing to the podcast.

Debbie Harry is an icon, punk rock star, and self-proclaimed spokesperson for bees. As the frontwoman of Blondie, she came up through the avant-garde art scene in 1970s New York, trading artistic inspiration with Andy Warhol, Basquiat, and Patti Smith. After breaking into the mainstream with its 1979 album Parallel Lines, Harry and the rest of the band have been bending musical genres ever since.

In this raw and in-depth interview with Mother Jones DC Bureau Chief David Corn, Debbie Harry opens up about her past and her compulsive creative drive. She shares stories about what it was like breaking into the male-dominated music industry, why she loves David Bowie, and how she came up with her alter-ego Blondie. Plus, she shares how she is using her fame to protect the honeybees.

Corn’s interview with Harry is one in a series of several notable guests featured over three episodes of the Mother Jones Podcast. It’s a special summer interview series with a very “2020” origin story: Earlier this year, the coronavirus pandemic stalled work on a new podcast, co-produced by Mother Jones and the Comedy Cellar, but not before three fascinating guests joined Corn for in-depth interviews about art, politics, comedy, and the philosophies that infuse their work. These chats were too good to simply shelve; last week we heard from actor and comedian John Leguizamo, and next week we’ll hear from talk show host Samantha Bee.

Actor, activist, author and educator John Leguizamo loves that his comedy makes people feel angry. In his 2018 one-man Broadway show, Latin History for Morons, the 55-year-old star splices jokes with history about the genocide of Native American people, his experience being racially profiled in the United States, and a welter of statistics about the underrepresentation of Latinx people in American media. Born in Colombia and raised in Queens, New York, Leguizamo grew up seeing negative portrayals of Latinx people in Hollywood and in the pages of the New York Times. This feeling of being an outsider, of not belonging, was a power that he eventually came to value—and harness as fuel for his comedy and acting career.

In January, Leguizamo sat down with Mother Jones’s DC Bureau Chief David Corn onstage at the Comedy Cellar, the historic New York City stand-up venue, to talk about his work, ego, process, and his favorite subject⁠: Latinx history.

Corn’s interview with Leguizamo is one in a series of several notable guests featured over the next three episodes. It’s a special summer interview series with a very “2020” origin story: Earlier this year, the coronavirus pandemic stalled work on a new podcast, co-produced by Mother Jones and the Comedy Cellar, but not before three fascinating guests joined Corn for in-depth interviews about art, politics, comedy, and the philosophies that infuse their work. These chats were too good to simply shelve; in the coming week’s you’ll also hear from music icon Debbie Harry, and talkshow host Samantha Bee.

Over nearly five decades, Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco has built a reputation as one of the nation's highest-profile rehab centers and prison diversion programs. It's earned a cult-like following among judges, politicians, and celebrities, including Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, Jane Fonda, and Clint Eastwood. But Delancey it has been subject to little oversight or scrutiny. On this episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, senior reporter Julia Lurie investigates an eccentric program with a number of long-standing practices that are rarely discussed in public. Participants work long hours with no pay, get not mental health services, are forbid from using psychiatric medications, and undergo rituals that some describe as psychological torture. Many Delancey alums credit the program's tough-love approach with saving their lives. But for others, it led to their unraveling.

You might recognize Diane Guerrero for her roles in big TV shows like Orange is the New Black, Jane the Virgin, and Doom Patrol. Off-screen, Guerrero has used her very public platforms to engage in activism and political causes. On Instagram, on Twitter, and in two books, Guerrero brings her deep knowledge and adept campaigning skills to the fight for immigration, voting rights, and racial justice reform. Mother Jones immigration reporter Fernanda Echavarri recently interviewed Guerrero for a live conversation that was streamed across Mother Jones’ social media platforms. Today’s podcast is an edited version of that conversation. Echavarri and Guerrero dig into their personal experience with racism in the Latinx community, the horrors of ICE detention, the current Black Lives Matter movement, and why the whiteness of the entertainment industry, on-screen and off, is such an urgent problem.

Donald Trump loves to lie. We know that. But as the editor and chief writer of the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” it’s Glenn Kessler’s job to keep count. Donald Trump has earned over 18,000 Pinocchios from the “Fact Checker” team for his many, many falsehoods, exaggerations, and outright lies. On this week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, Washington DC Bureau Chief David Corn interviews Kessler about his new book, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth, which he co-wrote with his “Fact Checker” colleagues Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly. Kessler gets into all of it—lies about the coronavirus, about rallies, about climate change—and assesses what might happen if Trump's lies are allowed to thrive for another four years.

After spending the last decade covering America’s criminal justice system, one thing is clear to activist, journalist and scholar Josie Duffy Rice: a grab-bag approach to policy reform isn’t going to fix all the problems with policing in America. Josie is the president of The Appeal, a non-profit news publication focused on criminal justice, and the co-host of the podcast, "Justice in America". She has been working in the weeds on issues that many Americans are now paying attention to in the wake of George Floyd’s killing—issues like police brutality, bloated police budgets, surveillance, pre-trial detention, cash bail, and the disproportionate police presence in communities of color. On this week’s show, Josie joins Jamilah King for a discussion about the recent police killing of Rayshard Brookes in Atlanta, the deep racist and classist structural issues with policing in America, and why defunding the police is only step one.

As national protests extend into a second week, associate producer Molly Swartz surveys the intersection of America’s twin crises, by profiling a group of out-of-work chefs hit by coronavirus closures who have banded together to provide protest-sustaining food in New York City. Also on the show, you’ll hear a repeat of our 2019 interview with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, whose book, “How To Be An Antiracist”, has climbed to third place on the New York Times bestseller list in the wake of the renewed protest movement, as Americans everywhere engage with his ideas about how to combat racism and the systems that abet it. Kendi combines searing autobiography with pointed analysis to show just how deeply racism is woven into our national—and global—fabric. He argues that the opposite of a racist isn’t someone who’s not racist, but instead an antiracist—someone who acknowledges how race has been constructed, and works actively against it.

George Floyd was confronted by police in Minneapolis and effectively choked to death as an officer knelt down on his neck before a crowd of onlookers. In a swelling of outrage, protesters have taken to the streets in dozens of American cities, calling for justice and reform. Floyd’s death follows on the heels of Ahmaud Arbery’s, Breonna Taylor’s, Tony McDade’s—all black American killed at the hands of police and white vigilantes over the past few months. Militarized police forces have responded to the protests with a level of violence not seen in the United States since 1968. On today’s show, Mother Jones reporters take you to the scene across the United States—from Minneapolis, where the protests began, to New York City and Los Angeles. We hear from two activists on the ground in Minneapolis, fighting fires and evacuating residents from white supremacists. We visit a rum bar turned food supply center in a Minneapolis food desert. We also go to the scene of protests across New York City. And we hear from activist Lex Steppling, who has a plan to defund the police.

By the time you listen to this episode, COVID-19 will have likely killed more than 100,000 people in the United States—more Americans than the Revolutionary, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars combined. Experts say the real tally is much higher. It's a devastating moment in a crisis that has already destroyed families, pushed nearly 40 million Americans out of work, revealed a government crippled by feeble leadership, and thrown daily life into chaos. How do we recognize that behind each death was a unique human life? How do we honor individual victims amid the tsunami of grief? It's hard. We don't have easy answers for you. But we do have some ideas. Rebecca Makkai, best-selling author of “The Great Believers", an epic about the AIDS crisis, discusses how she depicts the long tail of grief, and outlines lessons from one pandemic for another. Also on the show, scholar Elizabeth Outka, whose book "Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature" traces the impact of the 1918 flu on 20th century literature, describes how American culture was utterly altered by that tragedy, and provides cues for how art can help memorialize the dead during this one.