Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

We are just weeks away from an unprecedented election day. In order to vote safely during the pandemic, more people than ever are voting by mail or early in person, and early numbers point to a strong likelihood of record turnout. There are hundreds of lawsuits across the country centered on access to polling places, ballot drop boxes, and deadlines for ballots. And on top of all of that, we have...

How do we stabilize an economic crisis? Years before we faced the Coronavirus pandemic and the economic crises of the 21st century, the theories of British born economist John Maynard Keynes helped lead the United States out of the Great Depression. His ideas revolutionized how we looked at scarcity and invented our understanding macroeconomics. This week Zach Carter sits down to discuss his new b...

Here by popular demand – all your QAnon questions answered with two of the best reporters on the beat. Is QAnon a cult, a religion, a conspiracy theory, a state of mind? Who or what is Q? How did it gain such prominence and capture the minds of so many? Is it harmless – or is it dangerous? NBC reporters Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins help us pull on the thread of a movement that exploded off the...

Barbara Smith has been doing The Work for decades. Born into the era of Jim Crow, Smith joined the civil rights movement as a teenager in the 60s, volunteered at the Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland right out of high school, canvassed for housing rights, became part of the women’s movement after graduating college, and then co-founded a black feminist group called the Combahee River Collec...

Did we learn the right lessons from the Iraq war? Before we can answer that, we must understand why we went into Iraq in the first place. Author and journalist Robert Draper’s new book “To Start a War” chronicles with incredibly painstaking research and reporting how the most consequential foreign policy disaster of our time came to be. Listen to him detail why 18 months after September 11th, we i...

What does it take to keep a restaurant alive in the time of coronavirus? In March, restaurants across the country closed their doors in order to combat the spread of Covid-19. Left behind is an industry that is largely made up of small business owners scrambling to figure out how they can stay afloat. This week, Tony Bezsylko, co-owner of the local Chicago restaurant Cellar Door Provisions, sits d...

How did America’s modern conservative movement come to power? Historian and author Rick Perlstein’s prolific work has traced the arc of modern electoral politics, and specifically has laid out how modern conservatism arose. This week, he sits down to talk about his newest book “Reaganland” and how the ideological shifts and circumstances that lead to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan helped set t...

Whether it’s refrigerating your food or turning on the lights or connecting to the Internet, having access to power is what makes modern society possible. And yet, you likely have no choice in which company you get your power from. Whether the service is bad or they lobby against your own policy interests, it doesn’t matter – if you want power, you give them your money. It’s a sweet deal for those...

Originally Aired April 2019 Did you know there are roughly one million people currently held in internment camps in China? One million people detained against their will, facing no criminal charges, cut off from the outside world. This is the story of the Uyghurs, a small insulated ethnic minority in Western China. The predominantly Muslim group has faced growing levels of Islamophobia and paranoi...

Does the United States have a caste system? In her research on the Jim Crow South, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson found that the word ‘racism’ fell far short in capturing the depth and totality of oppression people existed under. In her powerful new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”, Wilkerson uses caste as a lens to reexamine ourselves and the arbitrary...

Did Donald Trump hijack the Republican party, or is he the party’s logical conclusion? Having spent decades as a political operative putting Republicans in office, Stuart Stevens argues it’s the latter. His new book “It Was All a Lie” sifts through the party’s decades-long march that led to the election of President Trump and reckons with what remains of the Republican political project. RELATED R...

How did wearing a mask become a polarizing issue? If you’re paying close attention, the arguments against masks might sound familiar: denying the science, cherry-picking data, cries of infringing on personal freedoms. It’s a page out of the Republican establishment’s playbook for weaponizing climate change denial. Back in 2018, Chris spoke with Vox writer David Roberts about the crisis of informat...

Who should we be building monuments to in America? Few figures have pushed for a truly fair and equal society in this country like Frederick Douglass. A man who saw the full promise of American democracy even years before the start of the Civil War. This week Chris sits down with professor and historian David Blight to talk about his Pulitzer winning book Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom . T...

How do you unseat a 16-term member of Congress? Ask Luke Hayes who is fresh off his role as campaign manager for Jamaal Bowman, a middle school principal poised to defeat New York Congressman Eliot Engel. Now, Luke’s here to talk about the nuts and bolts of campaigning and it absolutely doesn’t come up at all that Luke is also Chris’s younger brother. Let’s say you want to run for office – what ha...

Dr. Carl Hart wants to challenge the way you think about drugs. As a neuroscientist studying the effects drugs have on the brain, a lot of Dr. Hart's research undercuts some of the most pervasive stories we’ve been told about drugs. How much of our reaction to illicit drug use is based in the pharmacological facts versus social coding and moral judgement? And how have those narratives played into...

As protesters across the country continue to march in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a new scrutiny has been placed on our current policing system. Public sentiment has largely swung in favor of police reform, and many would recognize that the current system is in serious need of fixing, if not broken. So, what should be the role of police in society? Brandon del Pozo has a view from the i...

What are you prepared to dismantle? What are you prepared to build? As we witness this nationwide reckoning on racial disparities in America, these are the questions Sherrilyn Ifill, President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wants us to ask ourselves. In her work, she sees how the strength of each movement is built atop the ones that have come before. It’s slow and painstaking work, but to be a p...

If you want to understand the conversation around abolishing the police, you should start here. We can’t think of a better time for an encore presentation of this 2019 episode with Mariame Kaba on how to radically rethink our approach to public safety and what it would look like if we got rid of the criminal justice system as we know it. What if we just got rid of prisons? The United States is the...

If you listen to anyone about this time of rage and grief and action, make it Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Trymaine Lee. From his origins reporting on police and crime in Philadelphia to his nights covering Ferguson in 2014 to his Emmy Award-winning work on the lasting trauma of the violence in Chicago, Lee offers a raw and insightful perspective on this national moment. Subscribe to "Into Am...

Who thought the Electoral College was a good idea? In two of the last five presidential elections, the candidate who lost the popular vote still managed to win the White House. So why are we still electing the most powerful position this way and what are the alternatives? Jesse Wegman, author of the new book “Let the People Pick the President”, gives amazing insight into the slapdash construction...

What is the toll of becoming one of the most recognizable figures in the world? What are the downfalls of that level of fame? This week, we thought we'd try something a little different and discuss one of the most popular pieces of pop culture to come out in the era of physical distancing: ESPN's docuseries on Michael Jordan. "The Last Dance" paints a compelling portrait of the corrosive nature of...

What does education look like in the age of the coronavirus? What will it take for schools to reopen? The education system is in uncharted territory, with students isolated from their peers and guardians tasked with navigating the technological demands required by remote learning. Like everything else in this moment, there are more questions than answers about what comes next. Education reporter D...

How is the pandemic playing out in jails and prisons? Insufficient health care, a lack of protective gear, and the fundamental inability to physically distance have created inescapable outbreaks. Those incarcerated are at the center of some of the top coronavirus hot spots in the country. And as lawyer and president of The Appeal Josie Duffy Rice points out, these systems are porous; an outbreak i...

Are we doing enough to keep the economy alive through this crisis? So far, economic relief efforts have been messy, convoluted, and inequitably distributed. But while we talk about the steps taken to save the economy, we first need to know the structures in which that recovery originates. Who decides where the money goes, how are those decisions being made – and can these mechanisms be more effect...

Why are African Americans getting hit the hardest by the coronavirus? In part, this public health crisis is shining a light on the ramifications of policies and politics rooted in the legacy of racism. And what’s interesting, and what Heather McGhee is writing about for her upcoming book, is the way these racially motivated politics end up creating bad economic policy overall, producing a governme...