The Marc Steiner Show

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/roe-v-wade-is-gone-a-wave-of-criminalization-is-coming The recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case achieved something the right has pursued for decades—overturning Roe v. Wade. From legislation recognizing "fetal personhood" in Georgia and Alabama to a new Louisiana law that outlaws sending abortion pills in the mail,...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/the-right-won-by-playing-the-long-game-what-is-the-lefts-response “It took most of us far too long to fully comprehend that Trump’s presidency represented a qualitative uptick in the determination and capacity of the right to impose minority rule,” Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum, and Maria Poblet write in the introductory essay to their co-ed...

Read the transcript of this episode: In the richest country in the world, poor and low-income people are disproportionately harmed by everything from economic inequality and climate change to COVID-19 and gun violence, yet they are disproportionately excluded from the process of addressing any of these crises. That is why, on June 18, tens of thousands from around the country are expected to desce...

Donald Trump claimed to be a supporter of Medicare, yet his administration took numerous steps to cut its budget and introduce schemes to privatize it, including the Direct Contracting Entity (DCE) program, also known as ACO REACH. Rather than overturn this program, President Biden and his administration have been quietly letting it continue. As Branko Marcetic recently wrote in Jacobin magazine,...

From gang life and drug addiction in East LA to community organizing, activism, and becoming an internationally acclaimed poet and writer, Luis J. Rodriguez has walked a long and arduous path. Now Rodriguez is running for governor in the California primaries under the campaign slogan “Imagine a New California for Shared Well-Being. Then Let's Build It!” Primary voting will take place on June 7. In...

While the country waits with bated breath for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, it is becoming clearer by the day that this impending decision is part of a broader, reactionary push to undo decades of social progress and solidify the US as a hyper-unequal, theocratic, undemocratic fortress state. “All that we have fought for, from voting rights to reproductive rights, has been whittled aw...

Indigenous people have long stressed the unspeakable horrors of residential (boarding) schools in North America. Last year, those horrors were made inescapably real for many when mass graves were unearthed at multiple school locations in Canada. Since then, the fight to confront the colonial and genocidal function of these schools has ramped up, and that fight reached a new height when a delegatio...

“There are times when I want to scream out: “F*** this entire indifferent, hypocritical and violent world!’” So writes philosopher George Yancy in a recent piece for Truthout entitled “If the State of the World Makes You Want to Scream, You’re Not Alone.” From endless militarism and war profiteering to climate chaos and the reactionary right’s attacks on democracy and civil rights, the most natura...

Throughout our special special series of The Marc Steiner Show, co-hosted by Marc Steiner and Bill Fletcher Jr., we have examined the rise of the right in the US and beyond, we have explored the different tendencies and motivations fueling today’s surge in far-right politics, and we have engaged with a range of critical voices who have helped us understand how we got here and what we can do about...

As of this year, the total outstanding federal student loan debt is over $1.7 trillion, which is collectively held by around 46 million borrowers. Even with temporary, pandemic-related pauses on student loan repayments, the debt crisis continues to worsen, and calls for complete debt cancellation continue to mount. On April 4, as part of a national day of action, members and allies of the Debt Col...

Over the course of our special podcast series on the “Rise of the Right,” we have sought to understand the scope of the far right’s growth and influence in the US and beyond, the historical and ideological roots of today’s far-right movements, and how those movements are interconnected. But it would be inexcusable to end this series without exploring what can be done to blunt, if not fully defeat,...

The election of Donald Trump and the siege of the US Capitol on Jan. 6 made clear the rising political power of the right in America, but this is not an isolated phenomenon—right-wing power is surging across the globe. From India, Brazil, and the Philippines, to Hungary and the US, we find right-wing political movements that are challenging the established order and that are fueled by anti-immigra...

Whenever women have raised their voices and demanded equity in our society, or whenever oppressive gender relations have been threatened, a vicious backlash or counterattack inevitably follows. Sometimes under the cover of religion, other times justified by appealing to culture, tradition, or science, male supremacy and misogyny are central and alarmingly consistent features defining the politics...

What the official narrative of US history should be, who gets to tell that history, and who the protagonists are have been recurring debates since the founding of the American republic, but they became especially important and heated in the aftermath of the Civil War—and they have been a defining feature of far-right politics ever since. At stake is the question of whose country this is and to who...

The far right is not a monolithic project; it is, rather, a movement of movements that have grown out of the failures of capitalism as a social order and that are fueled by human society’s darkest tendencies (racism, misogyny, xenophobia, greed, domination, etc.). What are these different movements that make up what we call the far right today? What vision of social order are they fighting to impo...

The election of Donald Trump and the insurrectionary violence at the US Capitol on Jan. 6 are a bad dream that many desperately want to forget. But the political, economic, and cultural forces driving far-right political movements in the US and around the world have been brewing for decades, and they are not going away—quite the opposite, in fact. We need to understand where these forces come from...

While Ukrainians are suffering from the hell of war that has followed the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, debates have raged in the West over how the war started and who is responsible. But if people in the US specifically and the West in general insist on putting themselves at the center of this conflict—whether as the chief instigators or the necessary saviors—they will continue to misunderstand wh...

“War destroys all systems that sustain and nurture life–familial, economic, cultural, political, environmental, and social,” Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges writes. “Once war begins, no one, even those nominally in charge of waging war, can guess what will happen, how the war will develop, how it can drive armies and nations towards suicidal folly.” In this urgent, unscheduled segme...

At a racial justice demonstration in Portland on Feb. 19, well-known and respected activist June Knightly was shot and killed by far-right vigilante Benjamin Smith, who also severely injured four other activists before an armed protester opened fire on Smith. Activists in Portland have long warned of the increasingly brazen and dangerous violence from far-right groups and individuals, and many fea...

For over a month, Canada has been rocked by a “Freedom Convoy” of demonstrators and vehicle blockades that ultimately converged on the capital city of Ottawa in protest of COVID-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions. Having garnered support from conservative media, some members of Canada’s parliament, and prominent online voices like Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, the convoy quickly became a cultur...

Matthew Hoh is a disabled Marine combat veteran, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, and a member of the Eisenhower Media Initiative whom we have interviewed numerous times before on The Marc Steiner Show. Now he is the North Carolina Green Party’s first-ever nominated candidate to run for the US Senate. “We keep witnessing, undeniably, the brutal reality of a changing world, a...

“Christian nationalism has influenced the course of American politics and policy since the founding of this country, while, in every era, moral movements have had to fight for the Bible and the terrain that goes with it,” Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis recently wrote in The Nation. “The January 6 assault on the Capitol, while only the latest expression of such old battlelines, demonstrated the threat of a...

“On December 31, 2020, Tommy Raskin, the only son of Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, tragically took his own life after a long struggle with depression. Seven days later on January 6, Congressman Raskin returned to Congress to help certify the 2020 Presidential election results, when violent insurrectionists led by right wing extremist groups stormed the US Capitol hoping to hand four more year...

The concentration of wealth in the hands of a select few has become a global problem that poses a threat to the basic functioning of our societies. According to a landmark new analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies, Oxfam, the Fight Inequality Alliance, and Patriotic Millionaires, “A wealth tax of 2% on the world’s millionaires, 3% on those with wealth above $50 million and 5% on the world’s...

As Director for the Sierra Club of Hawai’i Wayne Tanaka recently wrote in The Guardian, the US Navy’s Red Hill Fuel Storage Facility is “a massive underground ‘farm’ of 18 million-liter fuel tanks and pipes just 100 feet above metropolitan O’ahu. Its construction began before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Since then, it has leaked over 180,000 gallons of petroleum into the groundwater aquife...