Start Making Sense Clips

Republicans and impeachment:  in the case of Nixon, it took them until the very end to jump ship--and those who defended him (Reagan and Bush Sr.) had better political futures than those who didn't.   Also: today they’re willing to criticize Trump on Turkey, but not on Ukraine—how come?  Jeet Heer comments.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcirc...

A new episode of ‘The Children’s Hour’--stories about Ivanka, Jared, Don Junior, and little Eric.  This week: who’s helping Dad fight impeachment?  And why has Ivanka left it up to the boys?  Amy Wilentz has our story. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Also: Afghanistan held elections on Saturday.  Trump had declared a couple of weeks ago that negotiations with the Taliban were “dead”-this was after he had promised to end the American war there. How WILL that war end? Andrew Bacevich has been thinking about that—he suggests it will follow the example of the Vietnam war.  Bacevich writes for TomDispatch, the LA Times, and The Nation. Advertising...

Thousands of Muslim women left their homes in the US and Europe to travel to Syria to join ISIS, the Islamic State, especially after it declared a Caliphate in 2013.  Many of them were educated and successful –  Why did they do it? Azadeh Moaveni wanted to find out—she spent years interviewing former ISIS women in camps in Turkey and Kurdistan.  Her new book is Guest House for Young Widows: Among...

In the UAW strike against General Motors, workers are seeking not only higher pay but also ending plant closures and making temporary workers permanent--many of them have been on the job for several years, and yet they are paid less and denied union benefits. Jane McAlevey comments—she’s The Nation’s new Strikes Correspondent. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out:...

Historian Eric Foner talks about about voter suppression and the right to vote, about who gets to be a citizen, what rights undocumented immigrants have, and about the history of mass incarceration--and how they all relate to the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, part of the country’s attempt to redefine citizenship after the end of slavery.  His new book is The Second Founding: How the Civil War an...

Edward Snowden published a memoir this week, called Permanent Record, and The Nation magazine features an excerpt--it’s about his youthful enthusiasm for home computers connected to the internet, which had just become available, and the contrast he draws between the internet in those days and what it soon brought: the “identitarian consistency” required by “surveillance capitalism.”   Editor D.D....

What’s really going on while Trump creates chaos: Sasha Abramsky separates what Trump is tweeting from what he's actually doing.  For example, this week there are more destructive initiatives on climate change and the environment.  Sasha's new column at TheNation.com is “Signal/Noise.” Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Thirteen House Republicans have announced their retirements in the past several weeks—they don’t want to run for reelection in 2020.  They are a diverse group, and include moderates as well as conservatives, some newcomers and some with decades of seniority (Like Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin), two of the party’s 13 women, and its only African-American Congressman.  How much can the Democrats hop...

It’s hard to keep track of Trump’s outrages—there are new ones virtually every day.  But Nation columnist Katha Pollitt remembers; she discusses almost every bad thing Trump did this summer.  And she takes up the question, is Trump getting worse?  More unhinged, more desperate, perhaps because he sees that his chances of winning reelection are not good? Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com...

Indivisible, the big network of local Democratic Party activists that sprang up after Trump’s victory, faces a big challenge: whether to endorse a candidate in the Democratic Primaries.  Joan Walsh reports on the conflict between the Washington headquarters of the organization and the hundreds of grassroots groups.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://red...

HUAC is history; the heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee was the 1950s.  But we’re still concerned about government attacks on people, and groups--called “Un-American.”  David Maaraniss has been thinking about that history – his father was called before HUAC in 1952 and then blacklisted from his job as a newspaper editor. His new book is “A Good American Family: The Red Scare and...

The synergy between politics and popular culture has never been clearer or stronger than in the Age of Reagan – and now there’s a wonderful new book on “movie culture in the Age of Reagan” – it’s called “Make My Day,” by J. Hoberman; for thirty years he was a film critic for the Village Voice.  He talks about Dirty Harry, “Star Wars,”  and “Ghostbusters” – and how Trump compares with Reagan, point...

Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile and accused sex trafficker - who surrounded himself with an elite network of political leaders, wannabe billionaire types, and even scientists – and who committed suicide over the weekend. Katha Pollitt considers the people who have been named in court documents as having accepted invitations from Jeffrey Epstein and also had sex with the underage girls he...

Last week—after the El Paso killings by a white nationalist--Tucker Carlson said on Fox news that white supremacy was “not a real problem in America.”  He called it “a hoax, just like the Russia hoax.” John Nichols examines the history of white nationalism in recent American politics, going back to the election of Barack Obama. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out:...

Last month was the 50th anniversary of Americans walking on the moon.  What would it take to get a similar mobilization today of money & effort—and vision–-to combat climate change?  D.D. Guttenplan comments – he’s editor of The Nation. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Trump gets worse every week.  Two years ago we had massive nationwide protest demonstrations -- so why don’t more people take it to the streets these days?  Nation columnist Katha Pollitt has been thinking about that. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Paul Krassner, the sixties anarchist activist and editor of “The Realist” – died July 21st – we re-play part of an interview where he talks about how he got Norman Mailer to come out against masturbation. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Also: Was Al Franken railroaded, when he was forced to resign from the Senate in the face of #MeToo complaints about unwanted sexual touching and kissing?  Jane Mayer wrote a long report on the case for The New Yorker and concluded “Yes, he was railroaded,” but our national political correspondent Jeet Heer disagrees. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://r...

Travel to Mars--now there’s a way to get away from Donald Trump!  Elon Musk, the billionaire who is co-founder of PayPal and Tesla, wants to build a colony on Mars.  Katha Pollitt thinks that’s not a good idea.  Actually she thinks it’s a terrible idea, but one that tells us something about the world we live in.     Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://red...

Announced in Bahrain to an audience of billionaires and Gulf potentates, Jared Kushner’s Mideast Peace Plan promised $50 billion in economic development funds to Palestinians—if they would abandon their aspirations for an independent state.  Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis participated in the conference.  Amy Wilentz, a longtime contributing editor at The Nation, comments – she was Jerus...

50 years after Stonewall, historian Martin Duberman argues that, despite the obvious and necessary victories, the radical heart of gay liberation has been abandoned.  The Gay Liberation Front of the late sixties critiqued monogamy, rather than campaigning for marriage equality, and opposed militarism and imperialism, rather than fighting to get gays into the military.  Duberman is a longtime activ...

Recently Andrew Basevitch visited the Middle East Conflicts Memorial – it’s like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but for all the Americans who fought and died in all of America’s wars in the Mideast. But unlike the Vietnam Memorial and the World War II Memorial, it’s not on the National Mall in Washington DC; instead, it’s in Marseilles, Illinois.  That says a lot about the place of our unending mi...

Joe Biden says some of them were segregationist senators – and he thinks that was a good thing, something that made it possible for him to pass important legislation.  Jeet Heer says that’s a fantasy—Republicans are not going to work with Biden if he gets the nomination and defeats Trump.  Jeet is a new National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation.   Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/b...

One of the great progressive victories last November, along with the mid-term Congressional races, was the vote in Florida to restore voting rights to people who had been convicted of felonies and served their sentences–1.4 million people.  But the voting rights news from Florida since then has not been so good--Sasha Abramsky explains.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy...