Jacobin Radio

Under President Trump, the media has become a part of the story like never before. Journalistic probing has irritated our touchy president. But media outlets have also played a role in Trump’s rise. During the campaign, cable news outlets provided him with wall-to-wall free advertising and, more recently, lauded Trump as “presidential” because he decided to bomb Syria. Adam Johnson, a writer at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, breaks it down.

Sebastian Budgen on the second round of the French elections, pitting a centrist against a fascist. And Sofia Japaridze on how foreign NGOs turned Georgia (the country) into a broke libertarian paradise.

Weissman interviews Tariq Ali, filmmaker, activist, and author of numerous books, on his new book The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution and the legacy of Vladimir Lenin 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

The Dig normally serves up ice cold, well-digested takes. Sometimes, however, something important happens and Dan finds someone who can help us understand it quickly. Last weekend’s election in France, which advanced the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen and neoliberal centrist Emmanuel Macron to a runoff, is one such event. Sebastian Budgen is an editor for Verso Books, a contributing editor at Jacobin, and a member of the editorial board at Historical Materialism.

Putting “black faces in high places,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, has not only failed to benefit the working class and poor black majority — it has actually harmed them by pushing an individualistic, meritocratic narrative that blames poor black people’s condition on their own personal failings. Taylor is a professor of American-American studies at Princeton and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, from Haymarket Books. She is a regular contributor to Jacobin and contributed a chapter called "What about racism? Don't socialists only care about class?" to The ABCs of Socialism.

RL interviews Chantel Johnson, whose brother Richie was one of the hundreds of young black men murdered in gun violence in Chicago in recent years. She and RL discuss the ties between violence and austerity in the city, the feeling of "conspiracy" against Richie and other poor black men like him in her neighborhood, and how anger at inequality in the city has become part of her grieving process.

Politicial scientist Thea Riofrancos on Ecuador's elections, the state of social movements and the Left there, and the decline of the pink tide in Latin America. Philosophers Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss on Jason Jorjani and the philosophy of alt-right.

Prisons don’t just keep inmates in; they keep the public out. Even at a moment when mass incarceration is under unprecedented criticism, it is hard for people on the outside to empathize with people who they cannot see or speak to. My guests today are Brett Story and Jordan Camp. Story is a filmmaker who has made an incredible new documentary called The Prison in 12 Landscapes, which shines a harsh light on America’s prison archipelago without ever taking a peek inside. Jordan Camp is a scholar of the American carceral state.

The Right has long looked to lower taxes, especially for rich people, out of a belief that rich people deserve to keep their money because they earned it. In other words, taxes impinge on their freedom. Mike McCarthy argues this is the wrong way to think both about taxation and about freedom. Mike McCarthy is a sociologist at Marquette University in Milwaukee and the author of Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions Since the New Deal. He has a chapter in The ABCs of Socialism called “Don’t the rich deserve to keep most of their money?”The ABCS of Socialism is available for only $5 on Jacobin’s web site. You can get it at jacobinmag.com/store. Also, be sure to listen to the other podcasts in our ABCs series, which tackle questions that include Why do socialists talk so much about workers? Doesn’t human nature make socialism impossible? Is socialism a western, Eurocentric concept? And isn’t the United States already king of socialist?

Max Sawicky on Republican tax schemes and Vijay Prashad on Syria.