Death Panel

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112179324 Beatrice speaks with Ja’Loni Owens about what we can learn from the discussion of abortion in last week’s Harris/Trump debate and how much of the subsequent fact checking of debate statements leaned into anti-abortion stigma. Find Ja'Loni's zine mentioned in the episode, Friends He...

Beatrice, Artie and Jules discuss the political economy of the pandemic and how organizing around covid and long covid intersects with priorities in movements across the left, including labor struggles and economic justice, disability justice, and abolition. Transcript forthcoming. This episode was recorded live at the 2024 Socialism Conference in Chicago. We collaborated with conference organizer...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/111673467 Beatrice speaks with Victoria Law about how prisons and jails have acted as vectors of covid transmission throughout the pandemic, the experiences of people on the inside from early in the pandemic through fights happening now over long covid in incarcerated people, and why it’s st...

This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on April 15th. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Beatrice speaks with Sasha Warren about the lessons we can take from the history of anti-psychiatry movements, and other movements aligned against earlier forms of asylums and mental hospitals, with a particu...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/110969806 Beatrice speaks with Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché about how the fight to abolish prisons touches other movements, what abolitionist movement wins tell us about taking the long view in organizing work, and their new book How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against I...

Beatrice speaks with Betsy Ladyzhets of The Sick Times about what wastewater surveillance does—and doesn’t—tell us about the level of covid spread and how the rise of covid wastewater monitoring fits inside the larger picture of the privatization of both covid risk and covid data. Transcript: www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/promises-and-perils-of-wastewater-data Find Betsy’s report, “Wastewater sur...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/110836544 Beatrice speaks with Silky Shah about the harsh immigration and border detention rhetoric on display at both the DNC and RNC this summer, the historical and material links between the rise of the immigration detention system and mass incarceration, and her new book, Unbuild Walls:...

Beatrice, Artie and Jules discuss the mask ban passed in Nassau County last week, the latest in a dramatic rise in legislation criminalizing face masks and targeting the Palestine solidarity movement. We look at what happened in the overtly hostile public hearing over the ban, the history of the New York statute that ban proponents want back, and how the threat of mask bans goes far beyond public...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/110415159 Beatrice speaks with October Krausch about how the cultural imaginary of covid and covid risk has shifted from some of the earliest interpretations of the pandemic, how social pressure amongst liberals to place trust in institutions led many to ignore ongoing risk, and their recent...

Beatrice and Jules discuss “managed care,” a seemingly innocuous term for a guiding principle in contemporary US healthcare that structures and incentivizes medical rationing and austerity. We also discuss how the use of managed care in state Medicaid programs leads to widespread denials for trans care. Transcript forthcoming. This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on August...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/109988706 Beatrice speaks with Kareem Rabie about how capitalist visions for “the day after” ceasefire often rely on economic development projects that act as an extension of settler colonialism, Rabie’s research on housing development projects in the West Bank in 2005-2009, and his 2021 boo...

Beatrice speaks with Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu about attempts to dismiss Aaron Bushnell’s self immolation as mental illness, and why settler colonialism relies so heavily on drawing lines between madness and “reason.” Note: intro from Artie ends at 0:03:30 Transcript: www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/aaron-bushnell This episode was originally released on February 29th, 2024 and we're re-releas...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/109524186 Beatrice speaks with William Boyd about how “risk assessment” became a central focus of health safety and environmental law since the 1970s, and how the political and economic factors that structure how those risks are assessed have resulted in law and policy far less likely to pro...

This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on July 8th. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Beatrice speaks with Sunaura Taylor about how industrial pollution and systemic abandonment produce networks of disability among people, animals, and what she calls “injured landscapes;” how one community in Ar...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/109069424 Beatrice, Artie and Jules discuss the sudden ascendance of Kamala Harris as the new Democratic Party nominee and take a close look at her record and early stances on Palestine, policing, and her (not quite) Medicare for All platform from 2020. Get Health Communism here: www.versobo...

Beatrice and Jules mark the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with a discussion of just how limited the law is compared with how it's portrayed, how to understand the ADA as part of the broader story of welfare state retrenchment in the 1980s and 1990s, and the broader story of how it got this way. Transcript: https://www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/the-ada-as-welfare-reform...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/108630596 Beatrice, Artie and Phil discuss Biden’s decision to step down, break down last week’s Republican National Convention, and how fitting it is that the last straw in Biden’s reelection campaign was a covid infection. Get Health Communism here: www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-com...

Bea, Artie and Jules discuss pundit speculation about Biden’s age and cognitive ability and the history of the relationship between bodily capacity and definitions of the “body politic.” This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on February 26th, 2024. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Transcript f...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/108202947 Beatrice, Artie and Jules discuss the Trump assassination attempt before diving into the weeks-long discourse on whether Biden should step down and the many assumptions and conjectures being made about Biden’s health and capacity. Find the earlier episode referenced at the top of t...

We tell the story of Section 504, a landmark piece of civil rights legislation for disabled people in the US. In Part One, we look at the politics leading up to the 504 sit-in and how the implementation of Section 504 very nearly didn't happen because of concerns that it would be "too expensive." In Part Two, our story continues with a look at the sit-in action itself—the longest occupation of a f...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/107751168 Beatrice speaks with Sunaura Taylor about how industrial pollution and systemic abandonment produce networks of disability among people, animals, and what she calls “injured landscapes;” how one community in Arizona organized against longstanding environmental pollution from arms m...

This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on October 23rd, 2023. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Beatrice speaks with Brian Nam-Sonenstein about two recent briefs he wrote for Prison Policy Initiative focused on a few key intersections of housing, disability, incarceration, and the administrative...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/107278315 Beatrice and Jules are joined by Charlie Markbreiter to discuss how liberals dismiss protest as merely “performative”—youthful, “inauthentic,” or “virtue signaling”—and how allegations of performativity turn the act of politics into a problem of optics and manners. Get Health Commu...

Beatrice speaks with Maryam Jamshidi about a number of new laws, and amendments to existing laws enacted at the onset of the war on terror, that Congress is currently drafting in order to crack down on actions in support of Palestinian liberation. We talk through what these laws do, how they target actions like the solidarity encampments seen at Universities this spring, and how they reveal the tr...

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/106825394 Beatrice, Artie and Abby discuss a recent piece by Freddie deBoer in New York Magazine that attempts to present a "left" case for supporting involuntary commitment policies and the expansion of the carceral state—claiming that “the disability activist community and their enablers i...