The Dig

Immigration law scholar @crimmigration breaks down the lies, misdirections and bigoted absurdities conveyed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he announced that the Trump Administration would cruelly make some 800,000 young people who came to this country as children deportable. Check out César's blog at crimmigration.com Support us at Patreon.com/TheDig

The devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey has made the denial of climate change all the more dangerous. But @KateAronoff says that mainstream liberals and environmental groups, touting cap-and-trade and business-friendly reforms, have put forward an agenda that can’t address the crisis and won’t mobilize the masses. We need a radical and transformative climate agenda. Thanks to our supporters at...

New Republic reporter Emily Atkin (@emorwee) talks about why Harvey is already and inherently political thanks to climate change and the potential for petrochemical disaster in Houston. When people criticize “politicizing” the disaster they are being political too: it is a naked effort to defend the destructive status quo of fossil-fueled neoliberal capitalism. Support us at patreon.com/thedig and...

Is the internet good or bad? The debate is more often than not a proxy for one about politics more generally and populism in particular. But the real issue with the internet is this: unaccountable businesses wield oligopoly power over the digital public sphere. Support us with some cash https://www.patreon.com/thedig And check out Adrian’s article http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/the-f...

Dan talks to Splinter Politics Editor Alex Pareene about his recent piece “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party” and about why Phoenix is Trump’s happy place. This second weekly episode costs time and money. We can only keep it up if you contribute at patreon.com/thedig Check out Pareene’s article and podcast http://splinternews.com/charlottesville-was-a-preview-of-t...

This is the war that never ends. The War on Terror’s permanence should be remarkable. It should be an outrage. But it is precisely because the war has become permanent that it has long since been rendered normal. Dan’s guest is historian Andrew Bacevich. Please note: they spoke before Trump’s recent announcement that the US would double down on the Afghanistan War. And please support the show at P...

New Republic writer Sarah Jones joins Dan to talk about Trump's invocation of the "alt-left" and to explain the term's unseemly centrist history. And more. We're gonna try doing two episodes each week now: the regular long Dig on Tuesdays and a shorter, hotter-take Diglet on Fridays. This will take more time and more money. If you listen to and love the show please support us at https://www.patreo...

The FARC peace accord is a historic victory for Colombian society. But the struggle to build an urban left strong enough to take on the country's powerful right remains a daunting one. Today's guest is Forrest Hylton, the author of Evil Hour in Colombia. Check out a great article from Forrest here https://www.academia.edu/26907051/The_Experience_of_Defeat_The_Colombian_Left_and_the_Cold_War_that_N...

With Trump, Mexico is the symbol and source of so many things that are wrong with the United States. Oftentimes, these stories told about Mexico in the United States aren’t just wrong but serve to obscure the true source of our shared problems—which, more often than not, are both countries’ ruling classes. Today's guest is Christy Thornton, a professor of history and international studies at Rowan...

We’re taking a quick break halfway into our four-part series of interviews on Latin America because this week is a big week for the American left: Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, is holding its first national convention since the organization has undergone a massive explosion in size. This episode is long as hell and we apologize that some of the audio quality is a little crappier than n...

Hugo Chávez's rise to power inspired leftists around the world. But today, Venezuela is in a profound economic and political crisis. A huge decline in oil prices gutted the revenue stream that Venezuela depended on to bankroll its social spending. The government led by Chavez’s successor Nicolás Maduro is increasingly turning to repression in response to constant, and often violent, protests from...

In Ecuador, the left won reelection this year, after Alianza PAÍS candidate Lenin Moreno, former President Rafael Correa’s vice president, narrowly won election this year. It was a major victory given the crisis hitting the pink tide of left governments throughout the region. But it was perilously close to a loss. Correa accomplished a lot for the country’s poor majority but did so thanks to a com...

What Trump has accomplished is spread fear through immigrant communities and, with the Muslim and refugee travel bans, made bigotry the explicit cornerstone of immigration policy. But on immigration, as on other matters, Trump does not emerge from a vacuum. Mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians have for decades built a giant deportation machine. Dan talks to Dara Lind, the immigration r...

Workers have for years faced a neoliberal onslaught administered by a bipartisan establishment of technocratic elites who have ensured the redistribution of wealth into the hands of the rich. This is an elite that has abetted the decimation of labor unions and whose primary disagreement are over how severely those expelled from the labor market should be allowed to suffer. My guest today is journa...

Donald Trump appears to many in the guise of a terrifying aberration. But in reality, he is the outcome of trends that are far too normal. We need movements to come together to not only defeat Trump but to take on the system that made him possible. Naomi Klein takes on Trump’s brand, and offers some thoughts as to how to tarnish it, in her new book “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politi...

Mass incarceration controls poor people and populations that have been excluded from the labor market. Politically, tough-on-crime rhetoric has for decades been a tool for politicians to appeal to white voters’ racism. But what’s less discussed is the complicated history of criminal justice politics within black communities and amongst black politicians. Yale Law professor James Forman talks about...

Bernie would have won. And in the UK, he sort of did last week. The Labour Party, under left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn (full name: Jeremy Bernard Corbyn) came far from behind and stripped Prime Minister Theresa May of her majority in parliament — after the punditocracy had confidently predicted that radicals had doomed Labour to electoral oblivion. Dan speaks to Richard Seymour, the author most re...

Nothing that so exposes Donald Trump as a snake oil salesman as the fact that he ran a campaign pitched at white working-class anger toward so-called globalism and then stacked his administration with representatives from Big Finance. A decade after Wall Street blew up the global economy, it is now very much in the drivers seat, sucking up as much wealth as possible from regular people and redistr...

Donald Trump won the presidency in significant part by pledging to do something that his predecessors had already mostly accomplished: building a big, beautiful wall on the border with Mexico. For liberals and centrists, the wall now shares a toxic association with Trump. But until recently, militarizing the border with Mexico was accepted as a core piece of the commonsense, bipartisan establishme...

The drug war is winding down and heating up all at the same time. States are legalizing recreational weed while prosecutors around the country are charging dealers, including small-time ones, with murder when their drugs contribute to someone else’s fatal overdose; attorney Jeff Sessions has instructed US Attorneys to go to the max on severe mandatory minimum sentences. Rick Lines, executive direc...

What’s the matter with Appalachia? Many liberal elites think they know the answer. Since Trump’s campaign first took off, the region has become a symbol of all that is wrong with Red State America: guns, bigotry, a willingness to get swindled by right-wing snake-oil salesmen. There is, indeed, a lot wrong with Appalachia. But what’s most wrong is that a region where people waged militant labor str...

The Women’s March on Washington sent a clear message that women would be at the lead in battling the right in the years to come. But it left unresolved significant divides that pervaded the 2016 primary campaign, as the many signs paying homage to Hillary Clinton made clear. Featherstone throws down Clinton's faux feminism, the Women's Strike, Bill de Blasio and more.

Why do Republicans only seem to care about deficits and debt when they’re trying to cut social welfare programs? Dan's guest for this special episode is Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He discusses Trump’s regressive tax proposal and the GOP's never ending efforts to redistribute wealth the super-rich.

The media has become a part of the story like perhaps never before. Journalist probing has irritated our touchy president. But media outlets have also played a role in Trump’s rise. During the campaign, cable news outlets provided him with wall-to-wall free advertising and, more recently, lauded Trump as “presidential” because he decided to attack Syria. Adam Johnson, a writer at Fairness and Accu...

The Dig normally serves up ice cold, well-digested takes. Sometimes, however, something important happens and Dan finds someone who can help us understand it quickly. Last weekend’s election in France, which advanced the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen and neoliberal centrist Emmanuel Macron to a runoff, is one such event. Sebastian Budgen, an editor for Verso Books, a contributing editor...