The Real News Podcast

“Between January 1 and July 14, 2021, at least 18 states enacted 30 laws that restrict access to the vote,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Hundreds of other bills with provisions aimed at restricting voting rights and access have been introduced in 49 other states. Combatting the relentless, top-down assault on our basic democratic rights is one of the most urgent political causes of...

The rural landscape in the US is changing drastically: The days of the independent family farm have increasingly given way to industrial agriculture and factory animal farms. In states around the country, from Iowa and Minnesota to North Carolina, the expansion of Big Agriculture and the factory farming industry has dramatically altered local economies and communities, using up communal resources...

After Gov. Ned Lamont signed a new bill into law in June, Connecticut became the first state in the US to make phone calls free for incarcerated people, including those in juvenile detention facilities. Studies show that having access to phone calls reduces violence in prisons and prisoner recidivism rates, so why have prisons and private companies been allowed to charge such exorbitant prices for...

Up until the pandemic, Kate was a massage therapist who loved her job. But when her employer wanted to push her and her co-workers back to work before they felt safe, she had to make a very difficult decision. In this episode of Working People, we talk to Kate about her life, the path that led her to working as a massage therapist, and we talk about the particular hazards massage therapists have f...

Citizen journalists continue to play a critical role in holding police accountable, which is why they face increasing pushback from the underlying system that bolsters bad cops. PAR speaks to cop watchers Laura Shark and Lackluster about the challenges they face when reporting on police, and how auditing law enforcement has become an increasingly dicey occupation. Become a supporter of this podcas...

It’s been seven months since Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC in an attempt to overturn the general election results. Was it merely a short but shocking fluke perpetrated by a handful of fanatics, or a sign of the right’s long (and continued) political slide towards open authoritarianism? In our first segment for this week’s episode of The Marc Steiner Show,...

Kip Kinkel was publicly reviled when, suffering from undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, he shot and killed his mother and father before killing two of his classmates and wounding 25 others in a mass shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, in 1998. Kinkel pled guilty to murder and attempted murder and was sentenced to 111 years in jail without the possibility of parole. Since then...

Hundreds of workers at the Frito-Lay manufacturing and distribution plant in Topeka, Kansas, have been on strike since July 5. Workers at Frito-Lay have endured years of disrespect, and many at the plant have seen their wages stagnate and fall behind other employers in the area. On top of that, workers have been caught in a horrible cycle that was greatly exacerbated by COVID 19: While more people...

The nation's endless war on mind-altering substances has many casualties, some who refuse to be forgotten. That's why Catherine Freeman is coming forward after 47 years to describe how her family was set up by a drug informant. In this episode of PAR, we listen to her story about how the intersection of law enforcement and politics tore her family apart, and why the truth must finally be told. Hel...

Amid power outages, food shortages, and continued fears over COVID-19, amplified by 60 years of economic strangulation by a US blockade, thousands of protestors in Cuba have taken to the streets to demand answers and action from their government. Mainstream media outlets in the US have jumped at the chance to paint these protests as singularly focused on repudiating the communist revolution, using...

Sonia Kumar, senior attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, explains the movement to restore the parole option to people sentenced for serious crimes in childhood. Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and making a small donation: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-yt Sign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-yt Like us on Facebook...

Back in May, the remains of 215 children were discovered on the grounds of a former residential (boarding) school in Canada that was used to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children—soon after, over 750 unmarked graves were discovered at another residential school. Given the historical brutality of such residential schools in their treatment of Indigenous children, it is widely suspected that simil...

When faced with unlawful intimidation and interrogation from management at Trader Joe's, Alex P. and his coworkers stood together and stood up for their rights in the workplace, eventually securing a crucial victory with the National Labor Relations Board. In this deep and wide-ranging conversation, we talk with Alex about his life and work—and so much more. We talk about growing up with strict im...

ACLU legal expert Sonia Kumar says the ruling slows but does not stop the movement toward more just sentencing for juveniles. Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and making a small donation: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-yt Sign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-yt Like us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnews...

Union miners at Warrior Met Coal in Brookwood, Alabama, have now been on strike for four long months, facing economic hardship, social stigma, and even physical assault on the picket line. But the miners have not been alone—it takes a village to win a strike. While the powerful executives and managers of the Wall Street hedge funds that power Warrior Met continue to hope that the strike will fizzl...

In a brazen effort to make political hay out of the right-wing culture wars, Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis has signed a slew of bills into law that, among other things, target transgender student athletes, further criminalize protests, limit voting rights, and surveil the political leanings of college professors, staff, and students. In our first segment for this week’s episode of Th...

We cover a lot of important worker struggles on this show, but it's important to cover worker victories as well—and workers in South Dakota just landed a huge victory. After suffering one of the worst COVID workplace outbreaks in the country last year, leading to four deaths and over 1,200 infections, workers at the Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls refused to back down on demands fo...

What would cause a former cop to cross the thin blue line and use his camera to monitor law enforcement and hold police accountable? For well-known police auditor James Madison, it was a fraught encounter with a police officer who threatened to falsely arrest him on his own property for filming him. In this week's PAR, we speak to Madison about his conversion from cop to cop watcher, and about the...

There is a battle happening in rural America: Across the country, rural farming communities are struggling to combat the relentless onslaught of Big Ag and the factory farming industry. With help from the federal and state governments, industrial farming and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) have colonized greater swathes of rural areas, upending what remains of the independent farmin...

The Trump administration's frequent antagonism toward China ushered in what many analysts have called a "new Cold War" between the two world powers. Rather than reverse course, President Biden has committed to thrusting the US further into a world-historical contest with China, declaring in his first speech to Congress in April, "We're in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21s...

In our first segment for this week’s episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc talks with Marjorie Cohn about the highly anticipated report from the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States, which issued a blistering indictment of police-perpetrated racist violence in the U.S. As Cohn writes in Truthout, “The Commiss...

Public debates about "Defund the Police" have seemingly devolved into an all-or-nothing rhetorical war with little room for nuance. But opponents of the slogan and the movement behind it routinely ignore the decades of profligate spending and wasteful use of taxpayer dollars that has become commonplace for many police departments. In this TRNN podcast, the hosts of the Police Accountability Report...

Earlier this month, No Evil Foods, a “progressive” vegan meat company founded in North Carolina, notified its staff that they were closing their Asheville production plant and moving to a co-manufacturing facility in Illinois. After working through the COVID-19 pandemic, workers were suddenly notified that they were now unemployed and would be receiving no severance. In this urgent episode, Jon Re...

Voters in Georgia stunned the nation in 2020 by delivering key presidential and Senate victories for Democrats. In response, Republicans have launched a renewed assault on voting rights that, critics argue, directly targets traditionally non-Republican voters and will be especially detrimental to Black, Brown, and working-class people. Among other provisions, Georgia Senate Bill 202 (the Election...

We will be back to our regular Working People schedule next week. Until then, to tide listeners over, and to celebrate his book recently receiving Honorable Mention for the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award, we're unlocking our bonus episode conversation with historian Nate Holdren. We talk with Nate about his latest book, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the P...