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The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single Wikipedia article about it, and pretend we’re experts. Because this is the internet, and that’s how it works now.
Citations Needed is a podcast about the intersection of media, PR, and power, hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
An award-winning, expertly-curated podcast of progressive politics and culture. Diving deeply on a wide range of topics, we draw from more than 100 sources of progressive news and commentary. Est. 2006.
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Episode 129 - Vaccine Apartheid: US Media's Uncritical Adoption of Racist "Intellectual Property" Dogma
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“The COVID-19 vaccine is ripe for the blackmarket,” warns an NBC News opinion piece. “Iran-linked hackers recently targeted coronavirus drugmaker Gilead,” reports Reuters. “Hackers ‘try to steal COVID vaccine secrets in intellectual property war,’” blares a Guardian headline. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged and pharmaceutical companies raced to deve…
The Burke and Wills expedition was organised by the Royal Society of Victoria in Australia in 1860–61. It consisted of 19 men led by Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills, with the objective of crossing Australia from Melbourne in the south, to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north, a distance of around 3,250 kilometres (approximately 2,000 mil…
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#1394 White Terrorism and Willful Ignorance
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Air Date 1/26/2021 Today we take a look at our long history of ignoring domestic, right-wing terrorism from the Oklahoma City bombing through to the predictable actions of militia groups in 2020 and beyond. Be part of the show! Leave us a message at 202-999-3991 or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Transcript MEMBERSHIP, Gift Memberships and Donations! (…
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#1261 Profitable Extremism (How Social Media Propagates Hate) (Repost)
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Air Date 4/2/2019 Today we take a look at the so-called "Algorithms of Oppression." Not that they're made to be that way on purpose but that it is a natural outcome of a profit-based system that incentivizes people to post the most click-baity content while the system learns the viewer's weaknesses to ruthlessly feed them whatever will keep them en…
The Battle of the Golden Spurs (Flemish: Guldensporenslag; French: Bataille des éperons d'or) was a military confrontation between the royal army of France and rebellious forces of the County of Flanders on 11 July 1302 during the Franco-Flemish War (1297–1305). It took place near the town of Kortrijk (Courtrai) in modern-day Belgium and resulted i…
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Episode 128 - The “Healing” Con: How Warm and Fuzzy Appeals for "Unity" Are Used to Protect Power
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"Biden Calls For Hope And Healing In Speech," NPR reports. "Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot calls for return to Sept. 11 unity," writes The Chicago Tribune. Following the 2014 Ferguson protests, a CNN headline read, "Obama: Now is the time for peace, healing." "Filmmaker Ken Burns aims for healing with new documentary about Vietnam War," the San Diego…
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1393 Opportunists, Enablers and Seditionists, the Rot at the Heart of the GOP
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MEMBERSHIP, Gift Memberships and Donations! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) MERCHANDISE! REFER-O-MATIC! Sign up, share widely, get rewards. It's that easy! Air Date 1/19/2021 Today we take a look at the historical roots and modern manifestations of how white supremacy has turned the GOP base into Frankenstein's monster which cannot be controlle…
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#1392 The Coup Klux Klan and the January 6 Insurrection
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Air Date 1/16/2021 Today we take a look at the underlying fears and motivations for the insurrection that go beyond the Big Lie™ of a stolen election to the bedrock of white supremacy that has driven white riots for more than 100 years. Be part of the show! Leave us a message at 202-999-3991 or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Transcript MEMBERSHIP, Gif…
Alien abduction, sometimes also called abduction phenomenon, alien abduction syndrome or UFO abduction, is a personally held belief in which the alleged "abductee" describes "subjectively real experiences" of being secretly kidnapped by non-human entities (aliens) and subjected to physical and psychological experimentation.[1] Most scientists and m…
Air Date 1/10/2021 Today, in our 15th-anniversary episode, we take a look at the the years and years of warning signs we having been highlighting since 2006 that collectively predict the armed insurrection against the government as the natural end point for a radicalized, conspiratorial, White/Christian-supremacist, permanently-minoritarian politic…
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News Brief: US Media Pathologically Incapable of Criticizing MAGA Mobs Without Evoking Racist Cliches About "Third World"
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Following today's mob violence at the U.S. capitol building, we break down how, once again, American media would rather ignore homegrown currents of white supremacist vigilantism and their buddy buddy relationship with law enforcement and focus instead on how an anomalous President Trump makes us like those horrible poor people of the Global South.…
This episode picks up on Wikipedia's list of unusual deaths, starting with the Medieval period. --- Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here. Be sure to check our website for more details.
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1390 Tell Stories, Not Myths: Our Second Founding (Reconstruction)
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MEMBERSHIP, Gift Memberships and Donations! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) MERCHANDISE! REFER-O-MATIC! Sign up, share widely, get rewards. It's that easy! Want to advertise/sponsor the show? Details -> advertisecast.com/BestoftheLeft Air Date 1/5/2021 Today we take a look at the often-overlooked decade of Reconstruction in the wake of the Civi…
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1355 I Can't Breathe, The Three Words That Define an Era (Repost)
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MEMBERSHIP and Gift Memberships! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) MERCHANDISE! REFER-O-MATIC! Sign up, share widely, get rewards. It's that easy! Air Date 6/29/2020 Today we take a look deeper at the concept of "I can't breathe," going beyond the literal utterances by victims of police brutality and COVID-19 sufferers to the metaphorical epidemi…
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#1333 An Examination of Fear, Anger, Forgiveness and Grace (and Mr. Rogers) (Repost)
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Air Date 2/20/2020 Today we take a look at the relationship between fear, anger and how to deal with the structural forces of harm in our society. To help us, we examine two of the greatest thinkers of the past 65 years, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mister Rogers, and go beyond the nonviolence of King and interrogate Mr. Roger's insistence on liking …
The Etruscan civilization (/ɪˈtrʌskən/) of ancient Italy covered a territory, at its greatest extent, of roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio,[2][3] as well as parts of what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto, and Campania.[4]
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1320 The Rise and Inevitable Fall of Neoliberalism (Repost)
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MEMBERSHIP, Gift Memberships and Donations! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) MERCHANDISE! REFER-O-MATIC! Sign up, share widely, get rewards. It's that easy! Air Date 11/20/2019 Today we take a look at several topics that, at first glance, may seem to be unrelated but that I think are all tied together with a thread that runs through all of them …
Lapland New Forest was a Christmas-themed park near Ringwood, Hampshire, UK.[1] The park had been advertised as being a "winter wonderland" with a variety of exciting family events such as a Christmas market and a "magical tunnel of light", but the majority of the promised attractions either malfunctioned or were of a very low quality. The park clo…
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1389 Tell Stories, Not Myths: Origins of the War on Christmas, Revealed!
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MEMBERSHIP, Gift Memberships and Donations! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) MERCHANDISE! REFER-O-MATIC! Sign up, share widely, get rewards. It's that easy! Air Date 12/22/2020 Today we take a look at the origins of the War on Christmas™ and the Christian Persecution Complex™ more broadly but with a particular focus on how that sense of persecut…
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1388 The Cathartic, Angry Description of Our COVID Response That You Need to Hear
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MEMBERSHIP, Gift Memberships and Donations! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) MERCHANDISE! REFER-O-MATIC! Sign up, share widely, get rewards. It's that easy! Air Date 12/18/2020 Today we take a look at the abysmal response to the pandemic in the US, the unavoidable racial overtones inherent in that failed response, the lasting trauma the pandemic…
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Episode 127: Democratic Leadership's Predictable Scapegoating of 'Defund the Police'
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"Sen. Mark Warner said progressives' calls to 'defund the police' were in part to blame for Democratic losses in the House in a cycle when the party was expected to gain seats," The Hill tells us. "How ’defund the police' sabotaged Democrats on Election Day," Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune writes."'Defund the police’ is killing our party, and…
The Boston Massacre was a confrontation on March 5, 1770, in which British soldiers shot and killed several people while being harassed by a mob in Boston. The event was heavily publicized by leading Patriots such as Paul Revere and Samuel Adams.[2][3][4] British troops had been stationed in the Province of Massachusetts Bay since 1768 in order to …
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1387 Hyper-Partisanship is Baked Into the System, Not a Result of Bad Actors
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MEMBERSHIP and Gift Memberships! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) MERCHANDISE! REFER-O-MATIC! Sign up, share widely, get rewards. It's that easy! Air Date 12/15/2020 Today we take a look at the current state of hyper-partisanship and its origins. The system seems broken because it is broken and it was never designed to work this way in the first…
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1386 Out With The Old Foreign Policy, In With The Even Older
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MEMBERSHIP and Gift Memberships! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) MERCHANDISE! REFER-O-MATIC! Sign up, share widely, get rewards. It's that easy! Air Date 12/12/2020 Today we take a look at the prospects for Biden's foreign policy looking forward which seems to be mostly looking backward to an era of American over-confidence and self-ascribed "e…
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Episode 126: Obama-Era Media Failures We Shouldn’t Rehash Under Biden (Part II)
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This is the second installment of our scoldy, buzzkill, two-part episode on Obama-era media failures we should be on the look out for as the Biden administration takes office. On this episode, we examine five more tropes that, sadly, are already being resurrected. Our guest is Roberto Lovato, author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, G…
James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician[3][4][5] and scientific skeptic[6][7][8] who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.[9] He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and founder of the James Randi Educational Found…
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1385 The Lost Causes of the Confederacy and the Forty Fives
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Air Date 12/9/2020 Today we take a look in real-time at the construction of the world's newest Lost Cause narrative, the failed re-election of Donald Trump. This is not our country's first experience with Lost Causes and it's not, contrary to popular opinion, even our second connection to a Lost Cause narrative because we didn't invent the first on…
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT! BotL in financial trouble and how you can help for free!
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Today's short announcement explains the financial hit the show unexpectedly took recently and lays out all of the ways you can help us get through it, one of which will cost you no money at all. Relevant links discussed: Membership/Gift Memberships (The lifeblood of the show!) New Merch Store! (Our first-ever merch availability!) Refer-O-Matic (Ear…
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News Brief: The ICE and Pentagon-Bloating Vagueness of the "Climate Change is a National Security Issue" Mantra
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In light of John Kerry's new "national security" climate role, we follow up on Episode 122 by reading policy papers published by John Kerry's think tank. Hint: they want more money for the Pentagon, ICE, and Border Patrol.
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1384 Beyond Trump. Radical Authoritarianism in America.
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Air Date 12/5/2020 Today we take a look at what's behind Trump and his autocratic instincts. The enablers, the supporters and the long lineage of authoritarianism. Be part of the show! Leave us a message at 202-999-3991 or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Transcript MEMBERSHIP and Gift Memberships! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) EPISODE SPONSORS: G…
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Ep. 125: Obama-Era Media Failures We Shouldn't Rehash Under Biden (Part I)
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President-elect Joe Biden has promised what he calls a return to "decency" and "unity," and American media has broadly characterized his victory over Donald Trump as, in the words of New York Times columnist Charles Blow, "The Third Term of the Obama Presidency." Many of the same holdovers — Samantha Power, Antony Blinken, Michèle Flournoy, Bob McD…
Maximilian I (Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph Maria, Spanish: Fernando Maximiliano José María de Habsburgo-Lorena; 6 July 1832 – 19 June 1867) was an Austrian archduke who reigned as the only Emperor of the Second Mexican Empire from 10 April 1864 until his execution on 19 June 1867. A younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, Maximilian ha…
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Best of the Left - Progressive Politics and Culture, Curated by a Human
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#1383 The Work That Wins Elections (Political Organizing)
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Air Date 12/2/2020 Today we take a look at some of the highlights of how the 2020 election was won, the people doing the work and what's still at stake. Be part of the show! Leave us a message at 202-999-3991 or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Transcript MEMBERSHIP and Gift Memberships! (Get AD FREE Shows & Bonus Content) EPISODE SPONSORS: GROUND.NEWS/…
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#1269 Following the thread of the global Great Transition (Repost)
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Air Date 5/3/2019 Today we take a look at several topics that, at first glance, may seem to be unrelated but that I think are all tied together with a thread that runs through all of them and points the way toward The Great Transition we are currently in the middle of. Be part of the show! Leave us a message at 202-999-3991 or email Jay@BestOfTheLe…
