The Real News Podcast

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,...

Adjunct faculty and lecturers at Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit university in Silicon Valley, have been working to organize a non-tenure track (NTT) faculty union for five years. Along with navigating the particular challenges that come with worker organizing in higher education, theirs is a historic campaign because it is taking place at a religious institution, which the National Labor...

Qualified immunity is a legal precedent that has allowed cops to evade accountability for violating civil rights for decades. But recent arguments in front of the federal circuit appeals court by two cop watchers could bring that precedent to an end. The Police Accountability Report examines how the actions taken by police in Lakeland, Colorado, to prevent First Amendment activists Liberty Freak...

As updates on the unspeakable mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, continue to come in, the details are as horrifying as they are horrifically familiar. Even more familiar has been the public response to these heinous crimes: empty “thoughts and prayers” and inaction from feckless politicians, and an immediate, depressing conviction among the population that nothing will change....

Caliber Public Schools, a group of charter schools in Northern California, states on its website that its mission is "to achieve educational equity by shifting the experiences, expectations and outcomes for students in historically underserved communities. Our strengths-based educational program validates, affirms, respects and supports students, families and staff members to reach their full pote...

“As a result of being on or near wastelands, prisons constantly expose those inside to serious environmental hazards, from tainted water to harmful air pollutants,” Leah Wang recently wrote for the Prison Policy Initiative. “These conditions manifest in health conditions and deaths that are unmistakably linked to those hazards.” In this edition of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Paul Wri...

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...

Eric King is an antifascist, antiracist, anarchist activist who is currently serving a 10-year federal prison sentence for throwing Molotov cocktails into an empty government office in Kansas City, Missouri, in solidarity with the 2014 uprisings after Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown. From the beginning of his imprisonment, King and his advocates say he has been...

The arrest of a Texas cop watcher for filming in public is the most recent chilling example of how law enforcement across the country is attempting to roll back auditors' First Amendment rights. Jack Miller, also known as Texas Sheepdog, was filming outside the Olmos Park, Texas, City Hall when police arrested and charged him with multiple crimes. The ensuing five-day trial and jury verdict reveal...

When a Minnesota couple called the police to intervene in a dispute with a neighbor they said was harassing them, they didn’t expect that they would be the ones to get raided and arrested. That’s precisely what happened, however, and the ordeal has left them questioning the motives of law enforcement in rural Minnesota; moreover, it has raised questions about how police in rural areas employ tacti...

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...

If you enjoyed our sweet, charming let’s-recommend-art-we-love episode of Art for the End Times, then you’ll love this hatin’-ass episode where we swing wildly in the other direction. Recorded on May 18—when, for a brief moment, there was some good news in the world, before everything went back to being terrible—Lyta convened a special all-TRNN panel of haters to blow off some steam and talk about...

If you were following the strikes and labor actions that happened last year, then you may have noticed that a certain face kept popping up in photos and reports from picket lines all over the country, from the Kelloggs’, Nabisco, and John Deere strikes, to the Warrior Met Coal miners caravan, to New York City. Who is this mysterious member of the Transport Workers Union making his way to states al...

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...

On March 18, dancers working at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood, California, presented a petition to the owners of the club “demanding an end to retaliatory firings and bad club policies that put their safety at risk.” The next day, dancers were locked out of their jobs and told they could only meet with management individually, not as a group. In response, the workers have tur...

“Prison food in the United States is a public health and human rights crisis,” the Maryland Food & Prison Abolition Project states on their website. “By weaponizing the experience of eating, the state transforms one of our most basic needs into an everyday form of violence. The short- and long-term effects of poor food conditions on incarcerated individuals' health also constitutes a form of ‘prem...

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...

This is the final podcast installment of our special series of conversations with teachers, organizers, scholars, and activists in Wisconsin that TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez, Cameron Granadino (TRNN), and Hannah Faris (In These Times) recorded in the summer of 2021 as part of a special collaboration between The Real News Network and In These Times magazine for “The Wisconsin Idea.” To...

From relentless war, militarism, and apartheid around the globe to climate catastrophe and reactionary attacks on civil rights and basic freedoms, the world is a scary place right now, and it is perfectly reasonable to feel despondent about it. It’s at times like this that we need art the most—not as some utilitarian salve for the pain we’re feeling, but because art connects us to the most joyful,...

On Sept. 7, 2021, after a majority of employees had formally expressed interest in unionizing, workers at G&D Integrated LLC—a transportation, logistics, warehousing, and supply chain services company in Central Illinois—marched on their boss together to demand recognition of the union. Their demands were not met. Then workers filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board and...

In this special investigative livestream, Police Accountability Report hosts Stephen Janis and Taya Graham discuss some of their findings from their ongoing investigation into the town of Milton, West Virginia. Milton first came to our attention with the arrest of Cody Cecil, a Michigan man whose trailer was raided by Milton police while parked in a private campground. But a series of successive i...

“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...

TRNN viewers may remember a recent interview we published at the beginning of February in which Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez spoke with retired railway engineer Jeff Kurtz about a US District Court blocking railroad workers at BNSF Railway from striking over the recent implementation of a draconian new attendance policy. Even if the story has faded from the headlines, the struggles railroad...

The rank-and-file effort to unionize Starbucks stores around the United States is one of the most head-spinningly historic worker-led movements in our generation. Since the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo, New York, made history by becoming the first location to unionize in December of 2021, around 250 Starbucks locations have filed for union elections, and the overwhelming majority of stores that...

On Monday, April 25, the N. Charles cafe in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood became the first Starbucks location in Maryland to unionize. The final election results, certified by the National Labor Relations Board, were a clean sweep: 14 “Yes” votes and zero “No” votes out of 22 eligible voters, with zero voided ballots. In this special podcast edition of Battleground Baltimore, recorded minute...