The Real News Podcast

Since 2013, Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and host of The Chris Hedges Report, has taught college courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history at East Jersey State Prison (aka “Rahway”) and other New Jersey prisons. In one such course, after reading plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, among others, Hedges’ students wrote a play of their own. The play, Caged, would...

The story of an El Paso family’s terrifying encounter with police shows just how treacherous it can be when we point our cameras at law enforcement. PAR speaks to members of the family, who were doing just that when cops decided to arrest them during a violent raid on their home. We dig deep into police records and examine video evidence that reveals how law enforcement can still retaliate when ca...

The Amazon Labor Union victory at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island was historic, but right now, as we speak, Amazon is currently in court trying to throw out the results of that election, and pro-union worker-organizers keep getting fired. One of those workers is Alicia Johnson, who, as Luigi Morris writes, is "a 56-year-old Black immigrant who lives in the deep Bronx and worked at JFK8 as a Pi...

The prison-industrial complex has many ways of turning the incarceration of human beings into a profitable business model. In New York state, new regulations targeting care packages for prisoners show this logic at work. Friends and families of incarcerated people can no longer send packages containing food to those inside, and are now limited to sending two “non-food packages” a year, purchased f...

The Loveland, Colorado, Police Department has made national headlines for brutality and overreach. But a new case involving the disturbing arrest of an entire family is raising more questions about what local officials are doing—if anything—to rein in the agency. PAR takes a deep dive into the details of a lawsuit filed against Loveland police, and speaks to a local civil rights attorney who is fi...

Love is rarely simple, and love on the high seas is no exception. The HBO Max show Our Flag Means Death brings something fresh to television we didn't know we needed until we saw it: queer pirate love. Created by David Jenkins and starring Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi, this romantic comedy series brings the right mix of humor, humanity, and heartthrob to light up our dark days. In this episode of...

America’s electoral system is broken. From partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression to an Electoral College that sidelines the popular vote, it should surprise no one that a majority of Americans don’t believe they live in a democracy. As the January 6 hearings play out in Congress, some argue that the attempted coup on that fateful day was only made possible by the fact that the American pol...

Native Americans overcame multiple challenges to turn out in record numbers during the 2020 elections, playing a crucial role in Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. One of those challenges: many Native reservations lack their own polling sites, forcing residents to sometimes travel hours to cast a ballot. As part of our series “Defending Democracy in the 2022 Midterm Elections,” TRNN’s Jaisal N...

Georgians went to the polls in record numbers during the May 24 primary ahead of the crucial 2022 midterm elections, despite renewed GOP efforts to suppress the votes of the state’s communities of color. Passed in the wake of the 2020 elections, inspired in large part by former President Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, Georgia’s SB 202 (the Election Integrity Act of 2021) is perhaps the...

In rural North Carolina, dog-whistle politics focused on scapegoating minorities for social and economic problems have long fueled racial resentment but have done little to address high poverty rates and rising inequality, says Alicia Walker-Patterson. This is why Walker-Patterson, deputy field director of Down Home North Carolina, works with other grassroots organizers to get residents in rural a...

We all know that, even before the horrific, world-changing event of COVID-19, society would fall apart without hospital workers and medical staff. But like so many other fields and sectors of work, the medical field is a very stratified one. Even though we as patients may not see it, many of the folks who make hospitals and medical facilities run are overworked, understaffed, under-protected, and...

Breathless media coverage of a purported ‘crime wave’ is galvanizing the right and prompting reactionary calls for expanding policing and the prison-industrial complex. Already, just two years after the historic nationwide protests in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, the pendulum has swung violently in the opposite direction, as exemplified in the right’s lionization of Kyle Rittenho...

UPDATE (7/1/2022): One day after this segment aired, prison authorities announced that they had “reconsidered” their earlier decision, clearing the way for Atiba to earn his degree. Education is one of the few rehabilitative options available to incarcerated people, yet all across America prisoners are prevented from pursuing their education. “Atiba” Demetrius Brown, for instance, has been dedicat...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding failure at every level of government to prevent its spread dealt a devastating blow to healthcare workers. Nurses, doctors, and other medical workers faced increasingly dangerous conditions, along with employers more concerned with increasing profits than saving the lives of their patients or employees. At St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts...

From Dollar General and Dollar Tree to Family Dollar, dollar stores are spreading rapidly throughout Louisiana and across the country, often strategically located in low-income communities and “food deserts.” But dollar store workers notoriously have to endure low pay, understaffing, and hazardous working conditions; some workers report frequently working alone in stores and having their air condi...

“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-edited book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections. “Forty years of Republican anti-tax, anti-regulator...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/how-native-organizers-won-voting-access-and-reached-record-turnout-in-2020 Native Americans overcame multiple challenges to turn out in record numbers during the 2020 elections, playing a crucial role in Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump. One of those challenges: many Native reservations lack their own polling sites, forcing resident...

The best-selling and (mostly) critically acclaimed Irish novelist Sally Rooney has sometimes come under fire for not—despite her professed personal left-leaning politics—writing “Marxist” novels. But what does a Marxist novel look like? Is the novel form itself inherently bourgeois? In this episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta Gold sits down with writer and McGill University PhD candidate Ri...

In this urgent episode of Working People, we get an update on Starbucks' escalating retaliation against pro-union workers and Starbucks Workers United. As Rina Torchinsky writes for NPR, "Starbucks is closing a store in Ithaca, NY, in what Starbucks union organizers are calling an illegal move of retaliation after workers at the location voted to unionize. The coffee giant gave the employees at th...

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 descend on Washington, DC, for the Poor Pe...

“At least 40% of people incarcerated in American women’s prisons identify somewhere under the broad lesbian-bisexual-trans-queer umbrella—a shocking statistic that holds true when looking at detention centers for youths as well,” historian Hugh Ryan recently wrote in The Washington Post. “As women’s incarceration skyrockets in America—increasing 700% in just the past 40 years—naming and dealing wi...

The story of one Minnesota couple's ongoing problems with police provides a pointed example of the systematic overpolicing of rural communities across the country. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis describe the couple's most recent encounter with cops, then they provide updates on a number of previous investigations into police overreach that...

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the world for the past two years, but there’s a potentially deadlier threat creeping across the globe right now that hardly anyone is talking about. According to a recent report in the medical journal The Lancet, drug-resistant bacterial infections were linked to five million deaths worldwide in 2019. According to a UK government study, antimicrobial resistance (AMR)...

The world is in a bleak state right now, and every day it feels a little more certain that the elite power brokers who control our society are not going to do anything to make things better. But giving up on the possibility of a better world and giving in to hopelessness and despair is not an option; if we’re going to get out of this mess, we have to fight. In her new acclaimed book Fight Like Hel...

As Wendy Sawyer and Wanda Bertram recently wrote for the Prison Policy Initiative, “Over half (58%) of all women in US prisons are mothers, as are 80% of women in jails, including many who are incarcerated awaiting trial simply because they can’t afford bail… And these numbers don’t cover the many women preparing to become mothers while locked up this year: An estimated 58,000 people every year ar...