Citations Needed4 Mars 2020

Episode 103: The Glib Left-Punching of "Purity Politics" Discourse

"Obama Warns Against 'Purity Tests' In Democratic Primary," Spectrum News reports. "Spare Me the Purity Racket," Maureen Dowd opines in The New York Times. "'Purity Tests' Divide Democrats," US News & World Report announces. "Political purity tests are for losers," bellows The Hill. We hear it all the time: progressives, leftists, radicals — and even liberals — are told they must not engage in the siren song of "purity politics." Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, we are told. We must be pragmatic, realistic, we must lay down our ideological arms and stop pining for Nirvana when so much is on the line in November. Evoking purity politics functions — more often than not — as a catch-all defense against any and all criticism of establishment Democrats. In 2016, Hillary Clinton partisans used it against Bernie Sanders supporters; in 2020, Bloomberg's flacks use it against Sanders again, and even Sanders partisans use it against leftist skeptics of electoralism. Put simply, purity politics is a Get Out Of Jail Free card, a perennial lesser of two evils narrative of an inherent impossibility of anything other than incremental change. At their core, charges of purity politics are ahistoric and anti-intellectual, pathologizing alternative theories of change that don't require political compromise as youthful vanity. Indeed, how to balance compromise and ideals has been, for centuries, the central question of the Left, everyone from French revolutionaries to Russian socialists, Black American radicals and Indigenous struggles in North America to Third World liberation movements around the globe have struggled to answer: when do we compromise and when do we not? But "purity politics" ignores this essential and rich question altogether, brushing aside morally fraught debates about political strategy and reducing anything short of the path of least resistance to unserious solipsism and juvenile stubbornness.   On this episode, we discuss how demands that people drop "purity politics" only go in one direction; how moral urgency has historically been pathologized as youthful narcissism; and how our jaded, broken media elites routinely conflate preemptive defeatism with political savvy. Our guest is attorney and writer Malaika Jabali.

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Episode 238: The Fictional, Racist, Paranoia-Sowing "Sleeper Cell" Media Construction

In this episode, we detail the vague, baseless racism-sowing media coverage and pop culture obsession with so-called "sleeper cells," a construction that has consumed post-9/11 America but suffers fro...

20 Maj 1h 30min

Live Show: 'How to Sell a Genocide' Book Talk at The Word Is Change Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY

This is a live recording between Nima and Adam at the Word is Change Bookstore May 7, 2026. In this conversation, we discuss key findings that can be found in Adam's new book, How to Sell a Genocide: ...

13 Maj 1h 3min

News Brief: "Peak TV," Streamer Studio Accounting Gimmicks, and the Precarity of Hollywood Labor

In this News Brief, we talk with Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller, authors of the new book Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers, about rising inequality and precarity in Hollywood, st...

6 Maj 47min

News Brief: How the Right Invented — and Exploited — the "Liberal Media" Trope

In this News Brief, we talk with A. J. Bauer, assistant professor at the University of Alabama, about his new book," Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press". In...

22 Apr 51min

Ep 237: How Selective, Patronizing 'Deradicalization' Discourse Pathologizes Anti-Colonial Struggle

In this episode, we break down the long history of US media reducing recalcitrant populations' grievances to "terrorism," "hate," and "radicalism" in urgent need of re-education. With guest Prem T...

15 Apr 1h 21min

Ep 236: Manufactured Austerity and the Media Assisted 'Public-Private Partnership' Rip-Off

In this episode we discuss how privatization was rebranded 'Public-Private Partnerships' and unleashed decades of raiding of the public coffers by Wall Street. With guest Donald Cohen, founder and exe...

8 Apr 1h 6min

News Brief: As American Troops Hide in Civilian Hotels, US Media Ignores Pentagon's Use of 'Human Shields'

In this News Brief we examine CNN, the Atlantic, Washington Post and NYT's blatant 'human shields' double standard as reports emerge of US troops hiding from Iranian attacks in civilian infrastructure...

1 Apr 17min

News Brief: How Decades of Media Distortions and Lies about "Iran's Nuclear Program" Lead to War

In this News Brief, we discuss a recent poll showing 70% of Americans are fundamentally wrong about the nature of Iran's "nuclear program"—including 1 in 4 who think Iran currently possesses a nuclear...

25 Mars 34min