Everywhere you turned in the aftermath of the 2020 election, someone was arguing a hard line on cultural issues as an explanation for the outcome. The point was made by different commentators of at least outwardly different political persuasions, with different code words and different bogeys—feminists, socialists, wokeness. However they might have varied, these arguments all circled the same thesis: The members of the working class—by which is always meant the white working class and very often, incoherently but significantly, the white middle class, too—have fled the Democratic Party because of its abandonment of the firm materiality of class politics for the soft superfluities of culture and identity.

On this week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, we revisit our essay by MoJo enterprise editor, Tommy Craggs, who argues that political analysts are now in the fifth decade of making some version of this claim—despite its two contradictory premises. The first is that these cultural issues are so powerful as to dislodge certain workers from their “natural” class affinities: One glimpse of the specter of wokeness and they go running into the arms of the party of the bosses and plutocrats who hate them. The second is that these cultural issues are so flimsy and evanescent as to vanish at the mention of “meat-and-potatoes issues.”

But which is it? Are cultural issues a set of powerful currents that buffet people around the political spectrum? Or are they a collection of irrelevancies and distractions with no real substance or meaning, lightly worn and easily dismissed?

These questions never seem to get answered. This stasis is what Tommy describes as the politics of stalemate, something his essay wants you to shake off. You can read Tommy’s original story here. This episode is part of our Summer series, produced in collaboration with Audm.

For five decades, Garry Trudeau has been writing what is one of the most important—and entertaining—comic strips in American history: Doonesbury. He started the strip in October, 1970 as a student at Yale. With its sharp-witted look at American politics and American life, it quickly became a phenomenon, eventually appearing in over 1,000 newspapers. He’s lampooned every president of the last half-century and has introduced us to scores of original and engaging characters. After the first Gulf War in 1991, he became a fierce advocate for wounded vets. In 2014, he ceased the daily strip. But his Sunday cartoons keeps on coming. With Doonesbury, Trudeau has been an American Dostoyevsky, producing a never-ending novel now stretching over 50 years. Trudeau became the first comic-strip artist to win a Pulitzer Prize.

On this bonus Summer episode, Mother Jones Washington D.C. bureau chief David Corn talks to Trudeau about how the pain and pride of veterans, his new commemorative collective of strips, and the art of drawing former President Donald Trump, “a right out-of-the-box cartoon character.”

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who has spent the last two decades pounding out bestselling accounts of American presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and George H.W. Bush. In June 2019, Joe Biden invited Meacham to Newark, Delaware, for a conversation about the biographer’s recent volume, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, a 416-page meditation on how enlightened political leaders, propelled by a civic-minded citizenry, have rescued America at its darkest hours. Meacham explained that the country’s soul “is not all good or all bad” but rather an abiding conflict between “our better angels” and “our worst instincts.”

Two months before Biden announced his third run for the presidency, the intellectual underpinnings of the campaign were already in place. His ensuing candidacy was an exercise in moving Meacham’s thesis from the page to the stump: Biden cribbed Meacham’s book title for his campaign framing, a “battle for the soul of the nation,” and Meacham occasionally weighed in on the narrative and thematic elements of Biden’s major speeches.

On today’s episode, listen to an exploration of how Meacham has lingered on as a sort of historical and spiritual adviser to a White House beset by crisis, written by Mother Jones reporter Kara Voght. This is our first in a biweekly Summer series of read-aloud investigations, produced by our partners at Audm. You can read Kara’s piece from April on MotherJones.com.

After three years of weekly episodes—that’s 181 shows, if you’re counting—the Mother Jones Podcast team has decided to switch things up for the next couple of months, as we, like you, emerge from a year that has thrown up enormous challenges, journalistically, politically, and personally. It’s time for Summer!

We’ve always strived to bring you the very best of our newsroom, and that includes the deeply reported stories and characters that our journalists to life. So, starting soon, we’re giving you more of the standout stories that aim to make sense of the world. We’re talking about the heroic families struggling to make it across the border, the champions of democracy who are fighting the GOP’s efforts to suppress voting rights, and the Washington, D.C. insiders who’d rather you not know much about them at all. Some of it will be fun, some of it will be serious, but we hope that all of it is clarifying: our best investigations, in an easy to access read-aloud form, produced by our storytelling partners at Audm. Think “audio book” for our long-form classics. It’s all work that we’re immensely proud of and excited to share with you in full.

And the best part: you don’t have to do a thing. We’ll space them out, so instead of a weekly show, expect a biweekly update in your podcast feed. In the meantime, we’re hard at work thinking of big ideas to make the show even better. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming as Summer moves into fall. Until then, just sit back, relax, and enjoy some of the best of what our reporters have to offer.

The deadly insurrection at the US Capitol wasn’t the start of something, nor was it the end. What happened on January 6 had been planned for weeks, and the ideology behind it, brewing for years. That day’s chaos was the moment in which a dangerous mix of far-right factions came together in a way that won’t be disentangled anytime soon.

Even now, nearly five months later, there’s still so much to process and still so many questions to answer (especially as Republicans work to forget the deadly attack ever happened). So at Mother Jones, we’re continuing to unpack what led to that day and what has followed.

In last week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, we brought you the story of an unlikely insurrectionist: Dr. Simone Gold, a Stanford-educated lawyer and emergency room physician who ended up on an FBI most wanted poster. And this week, with the help of Mother Jones disinformation reporter Ali Breland, we explore the historical foundations of modern political fringe movements, like QAnon, and consider how they are the outgrowth of paranoid conspiracy-mongering politics that have taken root across the US over the last century.

We hear from a former Oath Keeper about why he joined and later left the extremist militia. We meet one of the overlooked characters who poured gasoline onto the fire leading up to the insurrection, someone whose online popularity with Gen Z extremists reveals why it is not necessarily the generation that will save us. Plus, we talk to experts about what’s ahead and how we may not know how widespread extremist groups actually are.

As we approach the five-month anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, the Republican Party has made one thing clear: They want to forget all about it—holding Trump and his big lie closer than ever.

In the House, the party just kicked out a top leader, Rep. Liz Cheney, for calling out Trump’s lies and authoritarianism. Over in the Senate, Republicans are likely to stymie efforts to formalize a January 6 commission to investigate the attack. The GOP might be desperate to move on, but the Department of Justice—and the nation—isn’t. There are more than 400 cases working their way through the courts, in what has become the biggest counterintelligence operation since 9/11.

Over the next two episodes, the Mother Jones Podcast team gives you a snapshot of where we stand, what history has taught us, and what's next in the hunt for the insurrectionists. On today’s show: the story of someone who might not fit your picture of an insurrectionist—and how she was radicalized so quickly. Dr. Simone Gold is a Stanford-educated lawyer and board-certified emergency room physician who ended up on an FBI most wanted poster.

Guest host Fernanda Echavarri is joined by Mother Jones senior reporter Stephanie Mencimer, who charts Gold’s stereotype-busting rise from far-right media stardom to the steps of the Capitol on January 6. Her eventual arrest highlights not only the role of conservative media in fomenting an insurrection, but also illustrates what experts on extremism have long known: Education is no defense against radicalization.

The right-wing dark money group Heritage Action for America claims to be the mastermind behind the recent fire hose of state-level voter suppression laws, a new Mother Jones scoop reveals. Mother Jones voting rights reporter Ari Berman joins Jamilah King to walk through the explosive video he obtained of Jessica Anderson, the head of Heritage Action and a former Trump administration official, bragging about having drafted and funded voter suppression legislation in eight battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin.

“In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” Anderson says in the video. “Or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

Over the next two years, Heritage Action, the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, is planning to spend $24 million on efforts to pass and defend legislation that restricts voting. The video reveals the extent to which voter suppression laws are part of a coordinated campaign, funded by conservative special interest groups and dark money, to preserve GOP power by limiting voting. As of April 1, 361 voter suppression laws had been passed in this year alone.

“The Heritage Foundation raised about $122 million in their most recent tax filing, and they don't have to disclose who most of those donors are,” says Ari. “The fact that you have dark money writing and organizing campaigns to pass voter suppression laws, that's really a double whammy when it comes to how our democracy is being undermined.”

A Mother Jones investigation has found that hundreds of visa workers are stuck in India with no way to get back to their families in the United States. India is the in the midst of a shocking COVID-19 crisis. Health officials are reporting approximately 400,000 new cases a day. Hospitals are experiencing shortages of beds, oxygen, and medical supplies. Deaths are projected to reach 1 million by August.

Sinduja Rangarajan, Mother Jones’ Data and Interactives Editor, has reported that hundreds of Indian-Americans are stuck in India, caught up in the United States’s May 4 travel ban. Some are unable to get their legal visas stamped at US consulates in India because they are closed due to the pandemic. “A lot of people who went to help their families and their parents who are dying of COVID, or who went to grieve for their parents, are effectively stranded in India,” Sinduja says on the podcast.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration announced on May 5 that they are supporting a World Trade Organization resolution to waive vaccine patents in an effort to make vaccines more accessible and speed up inoculation efforts around the world. Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, joined host Jamilah King on the podcast to talk about the impact this decision could have on bringing the pandemic to an end. “The idea that we’re somehow hostage to these drug companies, that’s really not true,” says Baker. “If we can get vaccine production up and running in some of these countries in three, four or five months, that will still be an enormous help.”

Make sure to check out more of Sinduja’s reporting on the unfolding crisis in India at motherjones.com.

Natalie Baszile knew she was onto something when she got the call from Oprah’s people. A novelist and food justice activist, Baszile had been working for years on a semi-autobiographical novel about a Los Angeles-based Black woman who is unexpectedly faced with reviving an inherited family farm in Louisiana. The book became “Queen Sugar,” was published in 2014 and, with Oprah’s backing, it debuted as a television series on OWN in 2016. It was executive produced by Oprah Winfrey herself and directed by Ava DuVernay. American audiences were getting an intimate glimpse into how reverse migration was reshaping Black life in America.

Now, in a new anthology, Baszile is broadening her scope. In We Are Each Other’s Harvest, Baszile offers up a carefully curated collection of essays and interviews that get to the heart of why Black people’s connection to the land matters. Mother Jones food and agriculture correspondent Tom Philpott recently published an investigation called “Black Land Matters,” which explores how access to land has exacerbated the racial wealth gap in America. The story also takes a look at a younger generation of Black people who have begun to reclaim farming and the land on which their ancestors once toiled.

In this discussion, host Jamilah King talks with Baszile about how this new generation of Black farmers is actually tapping into wisdom that’s much older than they might have imagined.

This is a follow-up conversation to last week's episode, which took a deep look at how Black farmers are beginning a movement to wrestle with history and reclaim their agricultural heritage. Check it out in our feed.

Agriculture was once a major source of wealth among the Black middle class in America. But over the course of a century, Black-owned farmland, and the corresponding wealth, has diminished almost to the point of near extinction; only 1.7 percent of farms were owned by Black farmers in 2017. The story of how that happened–from sharecropping, to anti-Black terrorism, to exclusionary USDA loans–is the focus of this episode on the Mother Jones Podcast.

Tom Philpott, Mother Jones’ food and agriculture correspondent, joins Jamilah King on the show to talk about the racist history of farming and a new movement to reclaim Black farmland. 

You’ll hear from Tahz Walker, who helps run Tierra Negra farm, which sits on land that was once part of a huge and notorious plantation in North Carolina called Stagville. Today, descendants of people who were enslaved at Stagville own shares in Tierra Negra and harvest food from that land. Leah Penniman is another farmer in the movement. She is the author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, and the co-founder and managing director of a Soul Fire Farm, a cooperative farm she established in upstate New York that doubles as a training ground for farmers of color. 

The campaign to reclaim Black farmland has received some political backing. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced the Justice for Black Farmers Act in 2020, a bill that would attempt to reverse the discriminatory practices of the USDA by buying up farmland on the open market and giving it to Black farmers. The bill has received backing from high-profile on the left, including Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Reverend Raphael Warnock (D-GA), though it is unlikely to get the votes it would need to override the filibuster and pass.

On the episode, you’ll also hear from Dania Francis, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a researcher with the Land Loss and Reparations Project. When asked how about economic tactics for redressing the lost land and the current wealth gap, Francis suggests: “A direct way to address a wealth gap is to provide Black families with wealth.”