The Brian Lehrer Show

Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist, former columnist and associate editor of The Washington Post, political analyst and author of Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America (Simon & Schuster, 2026), shares his own family's story as it intersects with America's ongoing struggle with structural racism -- what's been accomplished and what still needs to be done.

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Elora Mukherjee, professor at Columbia Law School and director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, talks about the many children detained by US immigration authorities and argues for alternatives to detention for families.
→ Liam Ramos Was Just One of Hundreds of Children at This Detention Center. Release Them All.

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Sigal Samuel, senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect, talks about why many people in America are able to ignore politics and what our duty as citizens should be under an authoritarian government. 

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Andrew Weissmann, professor of practice at NYU School of Law, co-host of the podcast Main Justice and and the co-author of The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024), offers legal analysis of the news of the day, including the DOJ's release of the rest of the Epstein files, the DOJ's civil rights investigation into the Pretti killing and more.

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Early voting is underway in the primary to fill now-Governor Sherrill's seat in Congress.  Mike Hayes, WNYC/Gothamist New Jersey politics reporter and the author of The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform (Kingston Imperial, 2023), runs through the many candidates and their bases of support, ahead of the election on Thursday.

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President Trump is revoking Temporary Protected Status from Haitians in the United States, putting them at risk of deportation to a country experiencing unprecedented violence and a political crisis. Macollvie Neel, special projects editor at The Haitian Times, discusses the looming uncertainty for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who will be affected.

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Three of our favorite segments from the week, in case you missed them.

One Month of Mayor Mamdani (First) | How AI is Changing Medicine (Starts at 39:32) | A History of General Strikes (Starts at  1:09:33)

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Eric Blanc, assistant professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, author of several books including We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (University of California Press, 2025) and author of the Substack newsletter Labor Politics, talks about the history of general strikes, and what makes them effective, and listeners call in if they are participating in Friday's general strike.

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President Donald Trump and Democrats say they have reached a deal to avert a partial government shutdown. Siobhan Hughes, a reporter covering Congress in The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau, talks about the latest and whether Republicans will agree to limit funding and impose restrictions on the Department of Homeland Security. 

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As the cold snap continues and the piles of snow linger, listeners share if they've taken up a hobby appropriate to the season.

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