Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

Today, I'm kicking off a new thing that we're going to try, a second weekly episode that will be posted on Fridays.

The regular Tuesday episodes of The Dig are long and in-depth interviews with scholars, journalists, and activists.

And they are, to be sure, not typically pegged to the 24-hour cable news and Twitter cycle.

That's why I started the show and why, I presume, you listen to it.

But I think the second weekly episode, a shorter interview making sense of some of what

happened over the past week, will be a nice compliment.

My first guest for this mini dig, or diglet, is Sarah Jones, a writer at the New Republic. She is a really brilliant,

newish voice on the left. You probably know her, and she has been my guest before. We're going to

talk about the recent white supremacist

violence in Charlottesville and the false equivalency created by the notion of an alt-left,

a term that Trump recently invoked. What about the alt-left that came charging at the,

as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?

Let me ask you this. What about the fact that came charging, that they came charging with clubs

in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. So, you know, as far as

I'm concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.

Wait a minute. I'm not finished. I'm not finished fake news.

Wow. Gross as always.

But the term was actually popularized by centrist liberals as part of an ongoing smear campaign against socialists and radicals dating back to the Sanders campaign and

really to way before. This new feature that we're launching today, and I'll try to make it

weekly but can't yet promise that I can do so. We'll take time and money, and we can only continue

...