This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Sydney Ghazarian, a Los Angeles-based climate organizer with the Democratic Socialists of America, the founder of that organization’s Ecosocialist Working Group, and an advisory board member for the climate justice magazine The Trouble. After filling Roqayah and Kumars in on her own political background and evolution, as well as her recent involvement in DSA’s coronavirus response, Sydney talks about her work as a member both of the DSA’s Environmental Steering Committee and Green New Deal campaign committee.
The gang discusses Sydney’s article for In These Times outlining an agenda for escalating climate organizing based on tried-and-true labor tactics. Sydney shares her insight into major issues facing climate activists and others on the left, running the gamut from the racial politics of the environmental movement and what we can learn from indigenous-led pipeline blockades, to the socialist answer to the deepening oil price crash.
Follow Sydney on Twitter @SydneyAzari. You can also follow the DSA Ecosocialist Working Group @DSA_Enviro and find out more about how to get involved here.
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Roqayah is off this week, so Kumars is joined by farmer and organizer Nate Kleinman, cofounder of the nonprofit cooperative Experimental Farm Network (EFN) and project organizer of the EFN’s Cooperative Gardens Commission, a campaign to help millions of people carve out some measure of food sovereignty in the face of COVID-19. Nate begins by giving listeners a glimpse into his storied history of organizing, from Democratic political campaigns and labor union work to leading the charge on Occupy Sandy hurricane relief and running for Congress twice himself as a challenger to conservative Democratic incumbents, initially as “the first Occupy candidate” and then against Trump Democrat turned Republican Jeff van Drew.
Nate and Kumars then tackle the ins and outs of the EFN’s operation, including their free open-source platform for participatory plant breeding and developing new crops and infrastructure capable of providing for people in the face of economic crisis and climate catastrophe. Nate rounds out the hour with a rundown of EFN’s frontline efforts during the coronavirus pandemic and the necessity of building parallel infrastructure to help those most threatened by escalating instability to weather what’s coming.
You can follow the Experimental Farm Network on Facebook, find out more about the Cooperative Gardens Commission at coopgardens.org, and follow up on all the EFN’s other wonderful goods and services at their main site, experimentalfarmnetwork.org.
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This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein, current DC correspondent for The Nation whose explosive work has appeared in The Daily Beast, and The Young Turks, among others.
We take a look at Ken's latest exclusive which shows evidence that the Pentagon was specifically aware of the likelihood of a pandemic, according to an internal document composed in 2017 and obtained by The Nation.
Ken guides us through some of the eerily prescient 103-page document, which warns of the likelihood of hospital bed shortages, a lack of mechanical ventilators, and inadequate pharmaceutical treatment, all of which would come to "define how a country will emerge post-pandemic". We also discuss how the US is fairing compared to other nations, as well as the impact of the Trump administration's delayed response and what this poses for our future.
You can follow Ken and keep up with his work on Twitter @kenklippenstein and at The Nation.
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This is a special unlocked episode of Delete Your Account After Hours, normally only available on Patreon. Subscribe there for $5 for more like this!
On this herculean episode of Delete Your Account After Hours, friends of the show Nima Shirazi, Brett Payne and Bryan Quimby tag-team to give Kumars a primer on pro wrestling. Nima is a NYC-based political analyst who cohosts the podcast Citations Needed, Brett and Bryan are the hosts of Street Fight Radio, and together they share their wrestling fandom, breaking down their favorite personalities, labor issues in the industry, and the intersections between wrestling and conservative politics, including Trump’s history with the WWE.
Follow Brett on Twitter @BrettPain, Bryan @MurderBryan and Street Fight Radio @StreetFightWCRS. Nima is also @WideAsleepNima, and you can keep up with his latest work on his website and as well as Citations Needed.
This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by insurgent Congressional candidate Arati Kreibich, an activist, a neuroscientist, a borough councilmember in Glen Rock, New Jersey, and the primary challenger to conservative Democrat Josh Gottheimer, the current House representative for NJ’s 5th district.
After filling listeners in on her personal path to left-wing politics, including her family history of resistance to British colonialism and emigration to the United States, Arati describes the galvanizing effect of the 2016 election, and details the subsequent experience of disappointment after working to elect Gottheimer, ending almost a century of GOP representation for NJ-5. The gang examines Gottheimer’s record of voting with Republicans as co-chair of the right-wing “Problem Solvers Caucus,” and his reputation for personal unpleasantness. Arati, Roqayah and Kumars round out the hour with a policy discussion, covering the government’s coronavirus response and the urgency of radical climate action.
Follow Arati on Twitter @Arati4Congress, and visit her campaign website to learn more about her platform and how you can help!
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This week Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Detroit-based filmmakers Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, cofounders of Means Media and co-creators of the new digital streaming service Means TV, a workers’ cooperative and a left-wing alternative to soul-crushing corporate behemoths like Netflix.
Naomi and Nick share how they came to left politics and made a name for themselves producing the defining campaign videos for AOC and other insurgent congressional candidates in the run-up to the 2018 midterm election. They explain why the business magazine Fast Company named them one of the world’s most innovative companies, and give listeners a rundown of their diverse slate of content, including feature films, documentaries, animation and gaming content. The gang discusses their shared love for Street Fight Radio and the value of building our own independent cultural institutions in the face of increasing attempts by establishment media to co-opt the creative energy of the rising American left.
Follow Naomi on Twitter @NaomiABurton and Nick @nickhayesfilm. You can subscribe to Means TV and browse their content on their website, means.tv.
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This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Amanda, also known as @CatContentOnly on Twitter, an independent researcher based in NYC whose work focuses on cultural impressions around health and illnesses. Amanda, a medical anthropology graduate from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, discusses the one thing on everyone's mind this week: COVID-19, also known as the Coronavirus.
We take a deep look into what the Coronavirus is and the long term implications for those with compromised immune systems and other pre-existing medical conditions as well as homeless communities, who already face brutal restrictions and state sanctioned abuse.
Amanda helps us understand the ongoing failures of the US government in responding to what the World Health Organization has classified as a "pandemic". The crew also examines the xenophobic hysteria that has resulted in attacks on Asian communities and heightened stigmatization which includes the description of this virus as "foreign" and "Chinese".
Finally, we examine the impact that unilateral US sanctions are having on Iran during this pandemic and how China is attempting to assist Iran during this outbreak.
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Today we’re joined by writer and journalist Leslie Lee III, host of the left-wing arts and culture podcast Struggle Session, to take stock of the Bernie Sanders campaign thus far and the state of the Democratic primary race after another night of favorable results for Joe Biden.
After filling listeners in on his own origin story and the birth of Struggle Session, Leslie breaks down the media narratives around overwhelming black support for Biden and the various premature postmortems on Bernie’s 2020 bid. The gang discusses the importance of taking heart from how far we’ve come since 2016, keeping up the momentum around Bernie’s agenda to the convention, and expanding the base for a socialist movement by organizing around specific issues, regardless of electoral outcomes. Finally, the crew rounds out the hour with an obligatory Star Wars segment.
You can follow Leslie on Twitter @leslieleeiii and check out Struggle Session wherever pods are cast.
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This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Kate Willett, comedian, writer, and co-host of the left-wing feminist podcast Reply Guys. Kate has also appeared in Netflix's “Comedy Lineup” and recently made her network debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Kate dives into how she broke out in comedy and what has helped define her left-wing bona fides, including the tragic passing of her boyfriend, comedian Raghav Mehta.
We discuss her powerful essay for ELLE Magazine which explains just how Kate went from a Hillary Clinton fan to a quintessential Bernie Bro, and how canvassing for the Sanders campaign has helped her deal with the aftermath of losing Raghav.
If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!!
This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined from Jackson, Mississippi by veteran community organizers Pauline and Frederick Rogers. Pauline is President of the RECH Foundation or Reaching and Educating for Community Hope, and cofounder of that organization along with her husband Fred. Pauline and Frederick were both formerly incarcerated at Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm. Together they founded RECH as a prison and reentry ministry whose projects include the Wendy Hatcher Transitional Home and the Mississippi Freedom Letters Campaign in collaboration with historian and activist Garrett Felber, assistant professor of history the University of Mississippi and author of the book Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, out now from University of North Carolina Press.
After Pauline and Fred share a bit of how their lives have been impacted by the prison system, they outline the broad range of services and advocacy they are able to engage in through the RECH Foundation. Pauline, Fred and Garrett discuss the deepening prison crisis in Mississippi, where 19 inmates have died in state prisons since the end of last year, most of them in the notorious Parchman facility. They explain why the Mississippi prison system and especially Parchman have a particular reputation for brutality, detailing both the history of the institution and the current conditions inmates endure. The crew ends by giving their assessment of state and federal government responses to the crisis as well as the double-edged sword of celebrity-driven media attention that has recently brought Parchman into the national spotlight.
You can follow Pauline on Twitter @rechpauline, Garrett at @garrett_felber and learn more about everyone’s work at the RECH Foundation on their website.
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This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Briahna Joy Gray, National Press Secretary for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and co-host of the Hear The Bern podcast. After shedding light on her formative years before joining the Sanders campaign, Brie breaks down one of the most covered media narratives that has plagued the movement: the Bernie Bro myth. Brie unpacks the implications of this smear and explains just how diverse the Sanders coalition truly is.
The gang then discusses the weaponization of identity politics by members of the liberal pundit class, and breaks down how Bernie Sanders' policy positions stack up with the other candidates still left on the field. We also get into the unique outreach tactics employed by Sanders canvassers who knocked on over 500,000 doors in the lead up to the Iowa caucus, and who appealed to the most disenfranchised communities in places like Ottumwa where Donald Trump had swept in 2016.
We also weigh up Mike Bloomberg's infiltration into the Democratic primary and what the Sanders campaign is focusing on to continue their winning streak through Super Tuesday.
You can follow Brie on Twitter @briebriejoy, listen to the campaign's official podcast on Hear The Bern, and keep up to date with the Sanders movement at berniesanders.com.
If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!!
This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Lana Polansky, a Montreal-based video game critic, designer and journalist whose writing has appeared on Vice, Paste, and Kill Screen, among other outlets. After charting her personal journey to the intersection of gaming and left-wing politics, Lana explains the experimental impulses behind the category of indie games, with the help of a series of essays for the digital arts and culture outlet Rhizome detailing how the concept of empathy has become a buzzword in the industry.
Lana then gives listeners a lay of the land with respect to labor conditions for game workers and their efforts to organize, including her retrospective on Gamergate and the function of far-right cultural politics as worker suppression in a completely neoliberal industry, the new campaign by the Communications Workers of America in collaboration with Game Workers Unite to help unionize workers at game companies, and her own work with Game Curious Montreal, the “radical book club for games” bringing gaming enthusiasts together with local social justice organizers.
You can follow Lana on Twitter @mechapoetic, tune in to her weekly Twitch streams at twitch.tv/mechapoetic, keep up with her independent work on her personal website sufficientlyhuman.com and her other other independent work at patreon.com/Lana Polansky.
If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!
This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by returning guest Freddy Martinez, and Nathan "Nash" Sheard. Freddy is currently a policy analyst with the nonpartisan government accountability coalition Open The Government. Nash is an associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Freddy and Nash bring us up to speed on the explosive investigative report from the New York Times on the elusive facial recognition vendor, Clearview AI, which has scraped some three billion images for its database from social media platforms and sold them to law enforcement agencies for just $2,000 a month. We also explore the ways in which our personal information is being commodified and then sold back to as a part of wider surveillance capitalism; everything from the hottest security technology, like Ring, to software like Photoshop and everyday phone applications.
With help from Nash and Freddy, we unpack the feasibility of privacy legislation and how law enforcement organizations, like ICE, still manage to find legal ways to mine databases and use facial recognition technology with help from the world's leading tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Finally, we learn about active campaigns like the ACLU's "Press Pause" initiative that intend to help control the surge of facial recognition software and why an outright ban on this technology may be the safest way to protect our privacy.
If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!
This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Nima Shirazi is a NYC-based media critic and political analyst who edits the English-language Middle East news outlet Muftah and cohosts the podcast Citations Needed with friend of the show Adam Johnson. After sharing some choice tidbits about his formative years and political trajectory, Nima unpacks the ongoing saga surrounding the Iranian government’s accidental downing of a Ukrainian airliner during its military operation in retaliation for the Trump administration’s Jan. 3 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani.
The gang then discusses the fallout from Soleimani’s assassination, including the latest push for regime change and a rundown of the reactions from leading Democratic presidential candidates. Nima runs the gamut from growing up growing up as an Iranian American and rooting for the Iron Sheik, to the media’s demonization of Soleimani and branding of the Islamic Republic as a terrorist state, to a fresh wave of repression here at home, like the detention of Iranians (including US citizens) at the border as well as Facebook removing pro-Soleimani posts from Instagram under the pretense that they violate US sanctions.
You can follow Nima on Twitter @WideAsleepNima, keep up with his latest work on his website and over at Citations Needed.
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This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined once again by Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson. Nathan is also a PhD student at Harvard University, a columnist for the Guardian, and author of the new book Why You Should Be a Socialist. After filling listeners in on what he’s been up to since his first appearance on the show, Nathan lays out his pitch in the book and a recent article for NBC News to readers who might be socialists, but don’t know it yet.
Then the gang takes a deep dive into the political phenomenon of Pete Buttigieg, revisiting Nathan’s magnum opus on Buttigieg from early in his candidacy and expanding on it to cover his tenure as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, his consulting work for McKinsey & Company, his military service in Afghanistan, and his catastrophic record on racial issues. Finally, Nathan takes stock of the Buttigieg campaign’s momentum going forward and shares his take on the state of play in the Democratic primary.
You can follow Nathan on Twitter @NathanJRobinson, read his work over on the Current Affairs website and pick up Why You Should Be a Socialist wherever books are still sold.
If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!