Jacobin Radio: Trump’s War on Dissent w/ Pema Levy
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
The Roberts Court gave Trump sweeping immunity — and he’s using it to intimidate critics, greenlight ICE’s racial profiling raids, extort universities, law firms, corporations, and foreign governments, and crack down on political speech. Pema Levy of Mother Jones joins Suzi to unpack the landmark decision in Trump v. United States, a ruling that didn’t just grant Trump protection for official acts but armed him with the ability to wield the Justice Department as a personal weapon against political rivals. It’s as if the DOJ were Trump’s private legal office. Levy traces how legal and political practices are converging in an authoritarianism that threatens us all.
Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Jacobin Radio. I'm Susie Wiseman. |
| 0:26.0 | The Trump administration is putting the weight of the federal government behind, a crackdown on political speech it deems objectionable in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. |
| 0:35.8 | But Trump's crackdown began before this assassination, clamping down on free speech with the head of the murder of Charlie Kirk. But Trump's crackdown began before this assassination. |
| 0:39.3 | Clamping down on free speech, with the head of the FCC threatening to pull licenses of companies like Disney who own ABC is an ominous escalation, |
| 0:48.3 | but we've already seen constitutional violations with ICE detentions and deportations and have watched Trump extort |
| 0:55.6 | universities, law firms, and more. Today we turn to the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice, |
| 1:01.4 | and the accelerating erosion of Democratic guardrails under Donald Trump. Pam Levy of Mother |
| 1:07.9 | Jones has tracked the Supreme Court's radical empowerment of Trump, |
| 1:12.1 | and she joins us. Pema's reporting shows how the Roberts Court landmark decision in Trump |
| 1:19.3 | the United States didn't just grant Trump immunity from prosecution for his official acts. |
| 1:25.1 | It armed him with the ability to wield the Justice Department |
| 1:28.3 | is a personal weapon against political rivals. We've seen investigations launched against critics, |
| 1:34.4 | making the DOJ look now more like the president's private legal firm. To help us make sense |
| 1:41.2 | of this convergence of legal rulings, authoritarian practices, and their impact on democracy, we're really fortunate to have Pam Levy with us today. |
| 1:50.8 | All this when our program returns in just a moment. It's in our phones. It's in our laptops. It's in the cars we drive, the planes we fly, |
| 2:14.5 | and the algorithms that shape our world, and it generates obscene profits for |
| 2:19.1 | Boeing, Uber, and Open AI while putting everyone else in harm's way. The new book, |
| 2:24.8 | Fatal Abstraction, Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software, explains why the tech |
| 2:31.4 | industry keeps making oppressive, exploitative, dangerous software. |
| 2:35.9 | Written by Daryl Campbell, a contributor to The Verge, |
| 2:39.4 | it argues that a revolution of tech workers must stop our looming technological dystopia |
| 2:44.9 | because executives, investors never will. |
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