The Real News Podcast

From the Trump administration’s lies and flip-flops to social media feeds filled with AI slop and misinformation, it is infuriatingly difficult to get accurate and honest information about what is actually happening in the US-Israeli war on Iran. But award-winning journalist, lawyer, and former TRNN Board member Dimitri Lascaris has been reporting on the ground in Iran for the last two weeks, from...

When state violence and systemic denial of full citizenship by the state makes true belonging impossible for Black people, Black anarchists have envisioned and fought for a free life beyond the state. In this episode of Rattling the Bars , author William C. Anderson explores the rich, radical tradition of Black anarchism and its connection to prison abolitionist movements. Guests: William C. Ander...

While facing decades-long political efforts to throttle and privatize the United States Postal Service (USPS), and while US Postmaster General David Steiner ominously warns that the USPS will “run out of money” within a year, postal workers continue to deliver the mail and serve communities across the country. But that job has gotten harder, more dangerous, and more complicated in recent years. Fr...

Earth’s Greatest Enemy, the new blockbuster documentary by independent journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin, is an expansive and terrifying investigation into the existential threat that US empire in general—and the US military specifically—poses to humanity and to our planet. In this panel discussion, recorded after a live screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy on Jan. 29 at the TRNN studio in Balti...

Increasingly, Trump has his sights set on Mexico—promising to send in US troops in the name of fighting cartels and advancing a so-called drug war policy. But Trump’s actions harken back to an era of US empire much, much older. See, Mexico has withstood a long history of foreign intervention by the Spanish, French, and multiple times by the United States. In 1848, Mexico lost more than half its te...

3,800 workers and Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 members at the massive JBS beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, walked off the job on an unfair labor practice strike on March 16. This is the first strike ever at the Greeley plant—one of the largest in the country—and it’s the biggest meatpacking strike in the US since the 1985-86 strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota....

The Democratic Party has lost to Donald Trump and MAGA twice, and is continuing to lose working-class voters by clinging to corporate power, militarism, and a leadership class increasingly disconnected from its base. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Norman Solomon about his new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell, and the reality that the right can only be stopped by both c...

This week, March 24th, is the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Argentine coup that sunk the country into a brutal U.S.-backed military dictatorship. The regime would unleash terror across Argentina, disappearing 30,000 people in just seven years. Thousands detained. Tortured. Murdered. But people would resist, like the family members of the disappeared — the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They have mar...

With the public outraged over the US-Israeli war with Iran, the Epstein Files coverup, and a cost-of-living crisis, even President Trump’s base of supporters is fracturing, and Republicans are fixing to get slammed in the upcoming midterm elections. Perhaps that explains why Trump and MAGA Republicans are obsessively focused on attacking voting rights, taking federal control over the electoral sys...

Diane Wilson is a fourth-generation fisherwoman and a lifelong resident of Seadrift, Texas. Wilson has become a global folk hero over the course of her epic, decades-long journey from shrimp boat captain and mother of five to social and ecological justice warrior who took on a multibillion dollar corporation polluting the bays along her beloved Texas Gulf Coast. But the fight to save her home from...

With Cuba’s electric grid collapsing this week, the inhumane results of the Trump administration’s oil blockade continue to pile up and strangle Cuba and its people. In this urgent episode of The Marc Steiner Show , Marc speaks with American activist and co-founder of CODEPINK Medea Benjamin about her latest trip to Cuba, the extent of the devastation caused by the US-imposed blockade, and the twi...

At least 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are on board with Trump’s new military alliance. They are calling it the America’s Counter Cartel Coalition. Latin America’s top right-wing leaders are involved, including El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei. They met in Florida for the event on March 7th. The United States has promised to use lethal force to destroy cart...

As their public approval sinks lower and lower, the MAGA right is leaning harder and harder into policies of abject cruelty directed at vulnerable populations that have been turned into sacrificial scapegoats; that is especially true when it comes to immigrants and trans people. In the state of Kansas, for instance, Republicans just rammed through one of the most extreme anti-trans bills in the co...

38-year-old regional video gaming champion Ludovic Mbock, who came to the US legally from Cameroon, was snatched by ICE while applying for his yearly work permit—as he’s done for 20 years. He has since been detained for three weeks and moved to facilities in Louisiana and Georgia, and his freedom depends on a critical bond hearing this week. In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with...

A new report from The Marshall Project reveals that the daily number of kids in ICE detention has increased sixfold under the second Trump administration. In this episode of Rattling the Bars , host Mansa Musa speaks with Shannon Heffernan and Anna Flagg of The Marshall Project about the the human cost of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and about the horrifying reality inside the South Texas Fa...

President Trump’s catastrophic decision to plunge the US into a war with Iran is following a depressingly familiar playbook to those who lived through—and those who served in—the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show , Marc speaks with military veteran, author, and peace activist Rory Fanning—who served two tours in combat as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan—about...

The term “mass incarceration” is inaccurate and misleading, Distinguished Professor and author Dylan Rodríguez says: “The masses are not being policed, targeted, and incarcerated; it's a targeted war with asymmetrical casualties.” In this episode of Rattling the Bars , Rodríguez speaks with former political prisoner and Black Panther Mansa Musa about the horrifying truth behind the US prison-indus...

Cuba is facing the greatest existential threat it has seen in decades. Trash is filling streets, because garbage trucks can’t make the rounds. Rolling blackouts, rising food prices and cuts to transportation, university classes, and hospitals amid a gas shortage, the likes of which the country hasn’t seen in years. US President Donald Trump, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other officials h...

The US-Israeli war with Iran is spiraling into a regional catastrophe, and the number of dead is rising quickly. While President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the war hawks in their cabinets are responsible for this illegal war, they are not the only ones with blood on their hands. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Abby Martin, host of The Empire F...

As general president of the union, Sean O’Brien has operated with a “Teamsters vs. Everybody” mentality, especially when it comes to dealing with President Trump and embracing the MAGA right. But now, 14 months into the second Trump administration, the labor movement and the entire working class—Teamsters members included—is under attack. In this episode of Working People , we speak with veteran T...

From the very beginning, the United States of America has been at war—not just abroad, but domestically. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with scholar and author Dylan Rodríguez about how the US operates as a nation in a perpetual state of internal war, and how the white supremacist legacy of domestic warfare has reached terrifying new heights in the Trump era. Resource...

How did the promise of Black wealth become a tool for white elites? In this Black History Month special of Rattling the Bars , Mansa Musa speaks with UVA Professor and author Justene Hill Edwards about the tragic history of the Freedman’s Bank. They dive into the economic intelligence of enslaved people and how they navigated the inherent violence of the slave economy. Professor Hill Edwards also...

Urged on by Israel and neocon war hawks, President Trump has brought the US to the verge of a war with Iran, amassing more American military forces in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In this episode of  The Marc Steiner Show , Marc speaks with Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the disastrous ramifications...

In just six months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) more than tripled the amount of data stored on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform,The Guardian reports, “at the same time that its arsenal of surveillance technology ballooned.” This week, tech workers with the No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) campaign staged a protest and informational picket at Microsoft’s global headquarters in Redmond, W...

With President Trump marshaling the largest buildup of US military forces in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the threat of an imminent conflict—or even a major war—between the US and Iran is ever present. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with journalist Jeremy Scahill of DropSite news about where things stand now, the fragile state of this week’s talks between the U...