If overvalued tulips and real estate were the great bubbles of the past, then Brooklyn-based, left-wing podcasts shall be the fragile economic boom of the future. In an ever-growing market of socialist, feminist, anti-war, pro-worker gabfests, it can be hard to know where to start — that is, if one has, for some reason, decided to make podcast-listening a hobby.
If that’s the case, dear reader, then you are in luck. From the crude and borderline-canceled to the Ira Glass impersonators, here are eight of the top leftist podcasts to check out right now:
No list of lefty podcasts would be complete without first mentioning Chapo Trap House, the crude, ironic shock jocks of American socialism. Hosted by the rotating cast of Will Menaker, Matt Christman, Felix Biederman, Amber A’lee Frost, Virgil Texas and Chris Wade, Chapo is one of the highest-grossing projects on the crowdfunding site Patreon, where the talk show rakes in more than $1.9 million per year from some 36,000 paid subscribers.
This prominence has also allowed Chapo its fair share of celebrity guests, including figures from Hollywood like director Adam McKay and actor/comedian David Cross, and major political figures like Cynthia Nixon and Bernie Sanders. The show’s massive cache in socialist circles has made it a veritable kingmaker of the online left, boosting the profile of writers, podcasters, comedians, and other personalities who appear on the show.
One closely associated podcast is TrueAnon, hosted by Brace Belden and Liz Franczak. Franczak was previously a writer with bylines in publications like The Baffler, while Belden took a strange journey that included addiction and recovery, leftist shitposting, fighting with the YPG in Syria, organizing a union at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco, and now co-hosting a hit new podcast. Every week, Belden and Franczak, with the help of their producer Yung Chomsky, break down conspiracy theories, military and intelligence history, and the web surrounding billionaire and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, whose baffling life and death have become an obsession for many on the left. Belden and Franczak are just as ironic and vulgar as Chapo, but with a tin-foil hat twist.
Rounding out the top podcasts of the “dirtbag left” (a term coined by Chapo’s Amber A’lee Frost) is Red Scare, though many would dispute the show’s categorization as “left.” The disputes that the show and its two hosts, former art critic Anna Khachiyan and actress Dasha Nekrasova, have hatched among lefties are too numerous and complicated to list; suffice to say that the show’s primary hook in the oversaturated ecosystem of socialist podcasts is controversy. The show is known for its counterintuitive views, particularly feminism, with many detractors claiming the hosts often hue closer to conservatism than leftism. Either way, their listeners are eating it up: Red Scare earns around $36,000 a month from some 8,000 Patreon subscribers.
Moving to more buttoned-down, but still dirtbag-left-adjacent podcasts, the new kid on the block is Blowback, a limited-run series on the history and consequences of the war in Iraq. Hosted by former Chapo producer Brendan James and journalist Noah Kulwin, Blowback covers the memory-holed history of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the broader Middle East up to and through Operation Iraqi Freedom. While most of the left’s most prominent podcasts follow a talk show format, Kulwin and James take on the true crime model, blown up to discuss one of the great crimes of the 21st century with high production values and a tighter narrative arc — think RadioLab meets Alexander Cockburn.
Another lefty podcast for those used to the smooth production and calming voices of NPR is The Dig from Jacobin magazine, hosted by Daniel Denvir. Each week, Denvir hosts activists, journalists and intellectuals to discuss their views on the state of the world, covering every political topic under the sun: foreign policy, immigration, healthcare, and even the hit film “Sorry to Bother You.” Denvir is the Terry Gross of American socialism, always immensely prepared and deeply probing.
So if Blowback is anti-imperial RadioLab, and The Dig is Fresh Air for socialists, then — to stretch the NPR metaphors just a bit closer to the breaking point — the left also has its own version of WNYC’s On The Media: Citations Needed, a podcast covering “the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit.” Hosted by journalists Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, each week, the pair brings on an expert guest to dissect a particular problem in mainstream media, covering topics like the rehabilitation of Bush-era warhawks, the faux liberalism of the New Atheists, and the never-ending discourse around “civility” in political debate. Both high-minded and populist, Citations Needed aims to cut through the invisible forces of press dogma.
Cutting through the fog is a common goal for podcasts on the left, and two hosts known for their desire to do so are Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper of Rolling Stone’s Useful Idiots. Taibbi is the Rolling Stone writer and author beloved and/or hated by mainstream and lefty readers alike, while Halper is a longtime New York radio host and political gadfly known for her devotion to Twitter beefs and commitment to holding Democratic men accountable for sexual assault. The pair spends each show covering stories from the week, bringing on a range of guests, including lefty standard-bearers like Adolph Reed, Jr. and Thomas Frank, and liberal critics like Thomas Chatterton Williams.
For many early leftwing podcasts, starting a new show was about creating a space for like-minded voices. But as the title implies, Know Your Enemy is all about learning the ways of the right. Initially launched as an indie show by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler Bell (both journalists, Sitman being a former aspiring right-wing intellectual) the show has been picked up by Dissent magazine. Know Your Enemy episodes serve as primers of sorts on facets of conservatism, with guests like Jewish Currents editor David Klion (to discuss neoconservatives), New York writer Sarah Jones (to talk Trump Country and evangelical Christianity), and Ross Douthat (an actual conservative!). The show is informative without losing its well-sharpened leftist edge.
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