Deconstructed

From just a handful of cases a few weeks ago, the COVID-19 outbreak in the US has ballooned to over a thousand cases nationwide. The Trump administration’s public response has ranged from incoherent to incomprehensible: denialism about the scale of the problem, failure to test in sufficient numbers, a reluctance to take coordinated, large-scale government action. It’s also raised questions about t...

It’s being described as one of the biggest turnarounds in presidential primary history. After disappointing results in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Joe Biden appeared to be fading in Bernie Sanders’ rearview mirror. Then came his crushing win in South Carolina, after which Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg all dropped out of the race. Klobuchar and Buttigieg, along with former cand...

With victories in New Hampshire and Nevada and a firm lead in the national polls, Bernie Sanders is now unquestionably the frontrunner in the Democratic race. On Tuesday night the top contenders met for their final debate before the South Carolina and Super Tuesday primaries, and all of his opponents had their sights set firmly on the senator from Vermont. Mehdi Hasan talks to writer, activist, an...

On Wednesday night, 6 of the remaining Democratic candidates faced off in Las Vegas ahead of the Nevada caucuses. All eyes were on former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who, despite sitting out the early contests and appearing in none of the previous debates, has surged in many polls thanks to a relentless self-funded ad campaign. Would he live up to his own hype? In a word, no. Bloomberg was u...

The United States has the biggest prison population of any country on the planet. The crime rate is down, but the incarceration rate continues to soar. With the 2020 presidential election around the corner, what hope is there for fixing the system? Mehdi Hasan sits down with John Legend and Patrisse Cullors in Los Angeles for a live conversation about criminal justice. Deconstructed interviews a v...

As predicted, the Republican-controlled Senate voted on Wednesday to find President Donald J. Trump not guilty on both articles of impeachment brought by the House of Representatives. It was a party-line vote, with one notable exception: Utah Senator Mitt Romney became the first Senator in U.S. history to vote to remove a president of his own party. Democratic Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and B...

On January 20th, The Guardian published an op-ed by New York attorney and law professor Zephyr Teachout entitled “‘Middle Class’ Joe Biden has a corruption problem – it makes him a weak candidate” . In it, Teachout argues that Biden’s history of taking big donations from the credit card, healthcare, and fossil fuel industries and then voting on their behalf makes him a poor choice against Trump in...

With the Iowa caucuses less than two weeks away, the Democratic primary increasingly seems like a two-way contest between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. The latest polls show Biden leading in Iowa and Sanders leading nationally, and calls are getting louder for the lower-tier candidates to drop out and allow support to coalesce around the leaders. Despite faili...

Six of the remaining Democratic candidates met in Des Moines, Iowa on Tuesday night for their final debate before the state holds its first-in-the-nation caucuses on February 3rd. With the state of the race still fluid, the top contenders were all looking for a moment that might help them to distinguish themselves from the field. In the runup to the debate, much of the media focus was on the appar...

It’s been described as the worst human rights crisis in the world — the arbitrary detention in sprawling camps of a million or more Uighur Muslims in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province. The Chinese government has claimed that the camps are merely vocational training centers, but in November a trove of leaked documents, dubbed the China Cables, confirmed what the world had long suspected: the c...

The House Judiciary Committee held its first impeachment hearing on Wednesday, with testimony from a quartet of legal scholars from major Universities. Republicans on the committee repeatedly attempted to slow down the proceedings using parliamentary stall tactics, and continued to focus on the perceived partisan motivations of the impeachment process rather than the facts of the case against the...

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In the days leading up to the November Democratic debate in Atlanta, everyone seemed to agree that attacks on Pete Buttigieg would be the order of the night. The South Bend Mayor had lept to the top of the pack in the latest Iowa polls, and the conventional wisdom was that other candidates hoping for a caucus victory there — Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden — would be directing their fire his way. But...

Liberals across the West often imagine Canada as a progressive paradise — a tolerant land, welcoming to immigrants, where marijuana is legal and everyone gets free healthcare. But how accurate is that picture? In the wake of last month’s federal elections, in which Justin Trudeau held onto the Prime Minister's post but lost his majority in parliament, Deconstructed headed to Toronto for the HotDoc...

With three months to go until the Iowa caucuses, Bernie Sanders finds himself fighting to make headway against the other frontrunners in the Democratic primary. While he appears to have bounced back from his recent heart attack—putting in a convincing performance in the last debate and picking up a coveted endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—the democratic socialist from Vermont has struggle...

Linguist, activist, and political theorist Noam Chomsky has been speaking out against U.S. interventionism from Vietnam to Latin America and the Middle East since the 1960s. He’s the most cited author alive, but you won’t see him on the nightly news, or in the pages of most major newspapers. On this week’s Deconstructed, Chomsky sits down with Mehdi Hasan to discuss the impeachment inquiry, the 20...

In a live taping of The Intercept’s Deconstructed podcast, host Mehdi Hasan is joined by two of America’s leading progressive voices: first-term Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-American and one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, and documentarian Michael Moore, whose latest film, “Fahrenheit 11/9", takes an incisive look at the 2016 election and the crisis of A...

The twelve leading Democratic candidates met in Westerville, Ohio on Tuesday for the fourth debate of the 2020 primary season. The usual topics—healthcare, taxes, the impeachment inquiry—dominated the discussion, but the CNN moderators also asked the candidates to weigh in on a controversial proposal, gaining currency of late on the left, to expand the Supreme Court. So-called “court packing” is n...

Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke became the Democratic Party’s golden boy in 2018 thanks to his near-miss campaign against Senator Ted Cruz. Yet since declaring his campaign for the presidency back in March, his poll numbers have steadily declined. In recent weeks Beto has earned glowing reviews for his fiery rhetoric on gun control and Trump’s racism—and for his support for the Democrats’ nascent...

India’s clampdown on the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir is entering its third month, and while the right-wing government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has exerted tight control over the flow of information out of the region, a bleak picture has nonetheless emerged. Thousands have been imprisoned, including political leaders. Movement is tightly restricted. Phone lines have been cut off. Mod...

It finally happened: on Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. The final straw was a July phone call in which Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden, and appeared to suggest that US aid to Ukraine might be contingent upon his compliance. Nearly...

Israeli voters returned to the polls this week for the second time in five months to elect the 120 members of the Knesset, the country’s legislative body. The outcome remains too close to call, but it looks like Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest serving Prime Minister, may be denied a majority. His likely successor is former army chief of staff Benny Gantz of the Blue and White Party. Yet...

The Democratic candidates met in Houston on Thursday night for a third round of televised debates. This time the format was limited to a single night with 10 participants, which meant that for the first time, all the top-tier candidates were onstage together. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren defended their respective healthcare plans, but the center of attention was frontrunner Joe Biden, who s...

A whopping 20 Democratic presidential candidates met in Miami, Florida this week for the first in what promises to be a very long season of primary debates. Pre-debate buzz centered around frontrunners like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—or Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, who let the fireworks fly on the second night in a heated exchange over the ex-Vice President’s record on school bussing. One...

Calls for military action against Iran grew louder this week in response to the Trump Administration’s claims that the Islamic Republic was responsible for attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Many analysts and politicians, both in the US and abroad, expressed skepticism of those claims. But the US media appears to be falling into a familiar pattern, providing a sympathetic platform for the...