Start Making Sense Clips

Rennie Davis, who died on February 2, was probably the New Left's most talented organizer.  We spoke with him at a Nation magazine event at the end of September, where he recalled his trip to North Vietnam at the height of the war. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

For Black History Month, Gary Younge talks about Barack Obama and his memoir “A Promised Land” – and the refusal of many liberals to critique his policies and decisions.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Faced by the pandemic and economic collapse, Biden Biden knows he has to work harder and faster than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt – he doesn’t have a hundred days to launch his initiatives – he’s got to set the tone in ten.  John Nichols comments on what Biden has accomplished in his first week – and what his next priorities ought to be. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.co...

In Joe Biden’s first speech as president-elect,  he promised Black America that he would have their backs.   Now he needs to take prompt action to fulfill that pledge.  Barbara Ransby comments--she’s a historian, writer, and longtime political activist, a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, best known for her award-winning biography Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Mo...

Gary Younge, the award-winning former columnist for The Guardian and member of The Nation's editorial board, comments on the insurrectionists of January 6.  They failed to stop Congress from certifying Biden as the winner of the election -- so what WAS the plan?  and what IS their future? Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Biden’s first 100 days begin January 20, and his first acts should include an executive order cancelling student debt—that’s what Astra Taylor says, she’s co-founder of the Debt Collective and has published widely.  Other forms of debt cancellation can follow—medical debt, consumer debt, the coming bills for deferred rent and mortgage payments. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands P...

The PGA is cancelling their longstanding plans to hold its 2022 championship at Trump’s Bedminster golf course in New Jersey.  The New York Times reports he is more devastated by this than by impeachment.  The legendary sportswriter Robert Lipsyte comments on Trump and Golf.  (broadcast originally in August, 2017). Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redc...

Eric Foner provides historical perspective on Wednesday's attack on the capitol by that Trump mob, trying to stop Congress from declaring Biden the president-elect--and also on the unprecedented victories in the Georgia Senate races. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

2020 in review: the political year began with Bernie winning early primaries and losing the rest; then came the summer of Black Lives Matter, with the largest protest movement in American history; and then Election Day, without fighting in the streets or the courts overturning the results.  John Nichols comments. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcir...

Amy Wilentz reviews what happened in 2020 to Ivanka, Jared, Don Junior and Eric Trump—boy did those kids get into trouble this year!  Jared was put in charge of pandemic response, Ivanka carried the bible for that disastrous photo-op, and Don Junior and Eric tried to outdo their father on the campaign trail. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.c...

John le Carré died on Saturday—he was 89, and one of the greats, author of two dozen books people called “spy novels,” although they were much more than that. John Powers comments -- he’s critic-at-large on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Will Donald Trump pardon Ivanka and Jared – and Don Junior and Eric?  What exactly are their crimes?  It sounds like another episode of The Children’s Hour – with Amy Wilentz.   Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On Monday the Supreme Court heard arguments on Trump’s effort to change the way seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned.  It has been based on a state’s total population, as the Constitution requires; he wants to exclude the undocumented, which would mean California would lose 2 or 3 seats.  David Cole reviews the arguments – he’s The Nation’s legal affairs correspondent and national...

How are the Trump kids dealing with the refusal of their father to admit he lost the election?  Amy Wilentz comments –  on another episode of “The Children’s Hour,”  stories about Ivanka, Jared, Don Junior, Little Eric--and Lara, who wants to be the first of them to run for office.  But who IS Lara Trump?  Amy Wilentz explains. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out:...

The legendary film critic for the late lamented Village Voice, J. Hoberman, talks about Aaron Sorkin’s new film, playing now on Netflix, “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” He asks the question, “is it great courtroom drama – or boomer porn?”  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Black Lives Matter had massive victories in the elections in America’s biggest county—L.A., with 10 million people.  They elected a progressive D.A. and passed an initiative to re-imagine public safety by moving 10 per cent of the county’s $5 billion unrestricted budget to alternatives to incarceration, to community services, and barring the county from using the money on prisons, jails or law enf...

Joan Walsh looks at Trump’s support, and finds it shocking that he did about as well as last time, despite everything that he’s done in the last four years, culminating in the disaster of the pandemic response and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.  She concludes that too much of our country consists of racists who prefer white supremacy to equality.  Advertising Inquiries:...

Talking politics, and history, with Sherrod Brown.  Of course he’s the senior senator from Ohio, first elected in 2006.  He was re-elected in 2018- he won by 7 points--in a state Hillary Clinton had lost -- by 8 points -- just 2 years earlier.  He talks about how he did that, and how Biden has learned the lessons of that campaign.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-...

Maybe the election next week will have a big enough vote for Biden so that it can’t be challenged in court;  maybe the Republicans won’t dispute the outcome.  But maybe they will – we’ve had other disputed elections in our history --of course we had the Supreme Court stopping the count in Florida in 2000, and there was another one, much less well known–the election of 1876.  Historian Eric Foner e...

The new Aaron Sorkin film, “Trial of the Chicago 7,” opened on Netflix this past weekend.  Of course it’s about the 1969 trial of leaders of the antiwar movement, including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Rennie Davis--and we have Rennie Davis as a guest.  He was the New Left’s most talented organizer, and he talks about the film and the real history of those protests--and also politic...

Cell-phone videos of police killing Black people have had such an immense political impact over the last couple of years. Allissa Richardson comments on the new protest journalism, which is based largely on Twitter.  Her new book is “Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism.” Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out:...

Also: Ari Berman talks about voting rights and Republican vote suppression, about the voter protection efforts of the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party, and their plans to counter Trump’s plans to steal the election, and about recent Supreme Court decisions on voting rights cases.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Remember the days of the hashtag “Free Melania”?  Remember how we said she was a hostage in the White House?  Now there’s a book that says we were all wrong about that - Katha Pollitt talks about Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s “tell-not-quite-all,” Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady .   Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://...

How climate change is forcing migration out of low lying coastal areas: Sonia Shah reports on what happened in the Bahamian island of Abaco after Hurricane Dorian last September—and what we need to do now about migration forced by climate change.  Sonia is an award-winning reporter; her new book is The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move .   Advertising Inquiries: https...

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