This Is Hell!

Producer Sebastian muses on origin and utility of racial categories and introduces a 2019 interview with writer Ben Ehrenreich explains how Enlightenment-era ideas of progress and Western civilization collapsed time and space around the bumbling, destructive European ideology of early capitalism, and why those ideas still mis-guide the bumbling, destructive European ideology of late capitalism on...

Producer Lindsey introduces a 2017 interview with Journalist Sharon Lerner, who reports on the Exxon Mobil refinery polluting the majority-black Charlton-Pollard neighborhood of Beaumont, Texas, and the poisonous, 14 year silence from the EPA after the citizens' civil rights complaint, and connects the mechanisms of environmental racism to a history (and present) of regulatory rollbacks and indust...

Producer Dan introduces an interview with African American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor who in her book "Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership" examines the mechanism of racism in the American real estate industry - as post-1968 public policies pushed Black renters and homeowners into a racially stratified, predatory housing market withou...

Chuck is back live in studio for his first full interview in two months, welcoming back independent journalist and writer Alexander Zaitchik, who wrote the book "Owning the Sun - A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines." Chuck and Alexander talk about medical monopolies, the role people like Bill Gates and Joe Biden play in keeping medical patents in place, and wh...

Black Agenda Report's Danny Haiphong examines the lies at the root of the story America tells itself - as the corporate media obscures the reality of social relations at the base of American power, our collective notions of exceptionalism and innocence mask the exploitation that occurs around us everyday, and the exploiting class at the top of American society. In a brand new Moment of Truth Jeff...

Writer DaMaris Hill traces a history, and present, of Black women imprisoned in America - under a parallel regime of sexual violence and exploitation in the Jim Crow era and beyond, subject to the edges of a legal and economic system built on repression, risking freedom and safety in the simple acts of navigating daily life in a racist country. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/a-bound-woman-is-a-dang...

Producer Dan presents a 2019 interview with organizer Jenny Brown who examines the long history and present politics of the fight for abortions in America, and explains why the left must be clear and honest about abortion - as an unrestricted right, as a social service to be included in national healthcare, and as an unfinished front of the feminist revolution. https://www.versobooks.com/books/309...

Alex plays two interviews with Black Agenda Report founders Bruce Dixon (Jan 2017) and Glen Ford (Dec 2008)

Producer Sebastian presents a June 2020 interview with Writer Connor Woodman on his Verso blog series "The Imperial Boomerang" and in a new segment, Sebastian gets on his soapbox and lectures about the history of abortion rights and the anti-abortion right in the United States. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs?tag=375 Abortion rights: https://billmoyers.com/story/history-of-abortion-law-america/ h...

Writer Jessa Crispin rejects today's mainstreamed, neoliberal feminism, and calls for a return to feminism's radical promise: as a sharp-edged, outsider's social critique, as a challenge to the supremacy of capitalism, and as a path towards a radically reorganized society. https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/why-i-am-not-a-feminist/ https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Producer Dan presents a 2018 interview Chuck conducted with the amazing multi talented artist Boots Riley prompted by the release of his movie "Sorry to Bother You." Also due to the current news surrounding the United States Supreme Court's impending overturning of Roe v. Wade and the coming outlawing of abortions, here is a link to the National Abortion Fund where you can find a local fund to con...

Writer Asad Haider explains how today's reductive form of identity politics acts as an obstacle to understanding and confronting oppression. FIRST BROADCAST: June 2018.

Political scientist Cedric Johnson examines the collisions of race, class, policing and activism in the wake of George Floyd's murder, and explains why the Democratic Party and capital threaten to co-opt and re-direct the protest movement's energy unless it commits to a politics of redistribution and power for the working class. https://nonsite.org/the-triumph-of-black-lives-matter-and-neoliberal-...

Anthropologist James Doucet-Battle on sugar, diabetes, racialized science and his book "Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes" from University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/sweetness-in-the-blood

Dan replays two interviews Chuck did with the late, great David Graeber, the first about his book on bureaucracy "The Utopia of Rules," the second on the book "Bullshit Jobs." https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/the-utopia-of-rules/ https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-Jobs/David-Graeber/9781501143335

Alex replays Chuck's Oct 2021 conversation with writer Panashe Chigumadzi on her article "The Cry of Black Worldlessness" for Africa Is A Country. https://africasacountry.com/2021/10/the-cry-of-black-worldlessness

Writer adrienne maree brown explores the radical, liberatory potential of pleasure - to reclaim the self from the bounds of oppression, to restore our relationships with other people and the planet, and to imagine (and inhabit) the future worlds we hope to win with our activism. adrienne is author of the book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good from AK Press. https://www.akpress.org/pl...

Anthropologist Sarah Ihmoud on the dynamics of colonialist violence and domination against indigenous people in Palestine and across the globe, connecting those struggles across borders, and her article Sheikh Jarrah: The Question Before Us for Jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42757/Sheikh-Jarrah-The-Question-Before-Us

In another This is Limbo! episode, producer Sebastian muses about what drives fascism and presents two interviews, one with Antidote writer Ed Sutton and one with political analyst Natasha Lennard who both mused on these very questions themselves.

Alex replays Chuck's interview with theorist Jodi Dean on her book "Crowds and Party" from Verso Books. [First broadcast January 23 2016]

Sebastian replays Chuck's interview with historian Trevor Griffey on his article "A New Deal for College Teachers and Teaching" written with Mia McIver for the American Association of University Professors website, and in an ALL NEW Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen introduces The Other White Pride: Calcium. [Griffey interview first broadcast May 4, 2021] https://www.aaup.org/article/new-deal-college-...

Dan replays interviews with Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) and Mark Ames. [First broadcast Oct 20 2012 and April 30 2011]

Lindsey replays artist Cassie Thornton explores the revolutionary potential of The Hologram - a peer-to-peer system of care between people as equals in an unequal society. [First broadcast August 4, 2020]

Chuck returns! Plus Producer Alex replays Assistant Public Defender Adofo Minka on prisoner uprisings in St. Louis and across the United States [First broadcast April 29, 2021]

Writer and Activist Hadas Thier talks to Chuck about her Dollars & Sense Article "Cryptocurrency Will Not Liberate Us." Jeff Dorchen sees a phantom. Or was it a famine? Everyone wrestles with how to pronounce "paczki." http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2022/0122thier.html