Welcome to this monthly-ish-mix episode of the award-winning Best of Left podcast. In our regular episodes, we focus on one major theme presenting our top takes in the first hour of the show before diving deeper into each of those topics in the second half. For monthly-ish-mix episodes like this one, we skim across the surface of the past couple of months as a sort of quick recap and reference guide.

It's well known that many have felt the need to pull back from the news a bit for their mental health.

If that's you, then welcome.

If you know someone who fits that description, send them this episode.

We have four big sections and lots of subtopics to cover

today. If you want to skip around, reference the show notes for guidance. Section 1,

America Contested will open in the weeks following Jesse Jackson's death, a moment that forced

a reckoning with the multiracial working-class coalition America almost had.

Section 2, The American Way will follow American power overseas

from the CIA coup that overthrew Iran's democracy in 1953

to the blockade slowly strangling Cuba to the bombs falling on Iran right now,

the same playbook running on the same logic across

different decades and different administrations.

Section 3, controlling the game, will examine how that same logic operates at home, in the

AI all-guards and building empires accountable to no one, the sports money quietly purchasing

the rules everyone else lives under, and the courts

steadily dismantling the voting infrastructure that democracy depends on. And final section four,

history's engine will close not with despair, but with perspective, the religion and labor

traditions that have powered every major social transformation in American history, and Orban's

surprise defeat in Hungary as proof that even the most entrenched authoritarian project can come

undone.

But we begin with Section 1 on America contested, opening with episode 1775.

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