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    Chris Wallace to Quit CNN After 3 Years

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    The 77-year-old veteran anchor told The Daily Beast that he planned to venture into streaming or podcasting.Chris Wallace, a veteran TV anchor who left Fox News for CNN three years ago, announced on Monday that he was leaving his post to venture into the streaming or podcasting worlds.Mr. Wallace, 77, told The Daily Beast that he was leaving the network to pursue independent content creation, where, he told the outlet, “the action seems to be.” He mentioned he was still unsure what form of content he would make, but said his career in broadcasting was over.He said his decision to leave CNN at the end of his three-year contract did not come from discontent. “I have nothing but positive things to say. CNN was very good to me,” he said.One of the network’s most recognizable faces, Mr. Wallace started in 2022 as an on-screen commentator and hosted a weekly talk show called “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” He also anchored CNN’s coverage of the U.S. presidential election last week.Before joining CNN, Mr. Wallace worked at Fox News for 18 years and hosted “Fox News Sunday.” He turned heads at the conservative news outlet when he spoke out against President Trump’s “direct, sustained assault on freedom of the press” in 2020. He moderated an unruly presidential debate in 2020 between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Wallace had initially joined the network to be part of its new CNN+ service, which imploded just weeks after its much-promoted release.CNN’s chief executive, Mark Thompson, confirmed Mr. Wallace’s departure in a statement posted by the network.A representative for Mr. Wallace did not respond immediately to a request for comment. More

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      in Elections

      Vance Tells Rogan: Teens Become Trans to Get Into Ivy League

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      Senator JD Vance of Ohio criticized what he called “gender transition craziness,” spoke dismissively of women he claimed were “celebrating” their abortions and said that studies “connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics” during a three-hour episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that was released on Thursday.Mr. Vance criticized transgender and nonbinary people at length during the conversation, saying that he would not be surprised if he and his running mate, former President Donald J. Trump, won what he called “the normal gay guy vote.” And he suggested that children in upper-middle-class white families saw becoming trans as a way to improve their odds of getting into Ivy League colleges.“If you are a, you know, middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like, obviously, that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids,” Mr. Vance told Mr. Rogan. “But the one way that those people can participate in the D.E.I. bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.”Mr. Vance hit on a number of culture-war flashpoints and conservative cultural grievances as he spoke for more than three hours on Mr. Rogan’s immensely popular podcast, the latest in a series of interviews that he and Mr. Trump have done on podcasts aimed at young men. Mr. Rogan’s show is likely to be one of Mr. Vance’s most-watched campaign appearances: Mr. Rogan has 14.5 million followers on Spotify and 17.6 million on YouTube, many of them young men.At one point, Mr. Vance suggested that liberal women were publicly celebrating their abortions — “baking birthday cakes and posting about it” on social media — a notion Mr. Rogan pushed back on.“I think there’s very few people that are celebrating,” Mr. Rogan said.Mr. Rogan challenged Mr. Vance on abortion rights.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Call Her Daddy to Theo Von: how podcasts became a vital election tool

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      For much of this strange and unprecedented presidential campaign cycle, candidates have been making news for the press they aren’t doing, rather than what they say when they actually give interviews. Kamala Harris was criticized for a lack of real sit-downs following her sudden ascent to the nomination over the summer. Donald Trump, meanwhile, keeps pulling out of major-press interviews, including one with NBC News, as well as a 60 Minutes segment. (Harris did appear on the TV newsmagazine institution as scheduled.) But both candidates have firmed up their dedication to traveling into less traditional media territory: podcasts. Between the two of them, this may be the most podcast-favoring presidential campaign ever conducted.It might seem like an odd strategy. Even for hardcore podcast enthusiasts, it might feel like a medium that peaked in excitement a couple of election cycles ago, now lingering somewhere above Pokémon Go but below TikTok and Netflix. Format-wise, talk-based podcasts still hew closely to old-fashioned radio and – with video components now popular – talk shows, which don’t exactly feel like the most forward-thinking reference points. And though they can produce plenty of sound bites, podcasts aren’t exactly concise, either. Isn’t doing a big entertainment podcast akin to sitting for a lightweight Jimmy Fallon interview but at marathon length and, depending on the host, featuring even more self-satisfied cackling?Even if it is, though, it’s also considered a major avenue of access to certain broad audiences that might include undecided or undermotivated voters. Harris has initially gone both broader and more selective. Her biggest move was sitting for a 40-minute interview on Call Her Daddy, a relationships and advice podcast that’s a staple of the top five on Spotify’s charts. In other words, it’s the kind of broad-based show that sees itself as a relatively big-tent affair with a politically diverse audience. Host Alexandra Cooper began her episode practically apologizing for talking to a politician – the sitting vice-president of the United States! – because she generally tries to avoid politics.The first chunk of the interview did, indeed, largely avoid talking politics per se, given the show’s focus on mental and physical wellbeing, allowing Harris to get both personal and (in terms of her candidacy) pretty vague. But Harris did have the opportunity to talk about the major issue of abortion rights in the wake of Roe v Wade’s 2022 overturn, something Cooper obviously feels strongly about. And though the Call Her Daddy audience is too big to be completely homogenous, having Harris talk about this stuff with Cooper did feel like a tacit pitch to younger white women: here’s why this issue and this candidate should matter to you.View image in fullscreenIn that demographic sense, Call Her Daddy felt like an outlier in this recent season of podcast interviews. Harris’s other major podcast appearance so far was a longer (if often more personally focused) interview with All The Smoke, hosted by former basketball players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. So maybe the correct analogy isn’t the diminished influence of late-night talk shows or general-interest radio after all, but the unstoppable, evergreen blather of sports talk radio. Even Call Her Daddy, which has nothing in particular to do with sports, was owned by Barstool Sports for several years before it went to Spotify.Trump also went on a Barstool-affiliated show, Bussin’ With The Boys, hosted by former NFL players. His podcast playbook seems to be more focused on energizing the younger end of his base, the strange intersection of sports fans and comedy bros, where attaining some mixture of being perceived as kinda athletic or vaguely funny trumps, so to speak, all other concerns. Like Call Her Daddy, these shows also affect a kind of independent-thinking, quasi-apolitical posture – while also flattering their audience with the practiced pandering of a classic politician. In other words, it’s Trump country for people who don’t think of themselves as Trump country. So Trump gets to yuk it up with cult-of-personality comedians like Andrew Schulz or Theo Von, giving off the impression that, if you don’t pay too much attention, he’s a fun anti-woke bro who talks common sense. Even the occasional pushback he receives doesn’t actually question his basic worldview. When he misidentified the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif twice (as transgender, which she’s not; and as a man, which she’s not) on Bussin’ With The Boys, the hosts argued that her opponent should have stayed in the ring, rather than actually correct him about her gender status.Of course, no one is listening to a Barstool Sports podcast looking for heavy interrogation of a presidential candidate, and none of this seems likely to move the needle for truly undecided voters. (At best, it might raise a candidate’s profile among dudes who are undecided about whether they’ll remember to vote at all.) Maybe there was a point during the pre-Trump era where appearing approachable, sincere, funny or game on TV would change some minds in that classic Kennedy-over-Nixon way; the majority of voters seem too entrenched for that kind of perceptible shift today.That doesn’t make these shows aggressively marketing themselves as harmless, down to earth and essentially bipartisan are actually either of those things, though. Much as cultural critics are losing favor compared to friendlier, more “fun” influencers who serve as an ideally eager-to-please audience surrogate rather those cranky experts, actual journalists are losing ground to personalities like Joe Rogan – people in media positions who aren’t any more qualified to interview presidential candidates than a TV personality is to run the country. To wit: Harris is said to be considering an appearance on Rogan’s show because of its pull with a young and male audience. In the short term, in an close race, it might even make sense. But in pursuit of friendly, casual access to a lot of voters, candidates might well wind up in a podcast quagmire of their own making, where anyone can be turned into a harmless morning-zoo personality. By imitating the low-stakes bluster of sports talk, this chosen corner of the podcast world is upholding a questionable old-media tradition: turning a serious political moment back into a horse race. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Every day is a new conspiracy’: behind Trump’s ironclad grip on rightwing media

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      In the last few months, Donald Trump has done interviews with rightwing Twitch streamer Adin Ross and a host of podcasters, including Dr Phil, comedian Theo Von, computer scientist Lex Fridman, and YouTuber Logan Paul – part of what the Atlantic has dubbed Trump’s “red-pill podcast tour”.He’s posted incessantly on his own social media platform, Truth Social. He did a live space on Twitter/X with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk. He talked with Fox’s Laura Ingraham and called into Fox & Friends and spoke to other Fox hosts and personalities.His media strategy aligns with the current state of the rightwing media landscape: Fox is still a dominant source, but for the most Maga-adherent, it’s not Trumpy enough, despite some of its hosts embracing election denialism around the 2020 US election. Instead, there’s increasing fragmentation thanks to influencers and lesser-known outlets built around Trumpism.This is the first election since Tucker Carlson, once Fox’s loudest voice in a primetime spot, was reportedly fired by the network, and his solo ventures so far haven’t taken on the prominence he had on TV. It’s also the first election since longtime Republican heavyweight Rush Limbaugh died. These big changes have left holes in rightwing media, which were filled by an increasing cadre of influencers, content creators and smaller outlets.Adrianna Munoz, a 58-year-old from Queens, New York, who attended a Trump rally earlier this year in the Bronx, told the Guardian that she mostly gets news from YouTube, X and conservative commentators she follows, such as Tim Pool and Benny Johnson.“I used to watch TV news every morning – network news and the local news channel in New York,” she said. “Now I don’t. They sold out. They don’t tell you the truth. I don’t want to hear that rubbish.”Trump’s grip on rightwing media is ironclad, said Julie Millican, the vice-president of Media Matters, a progressive center that tracks conservative media. In the past, the Republican party and its candidates would follow what rightwing media did and align its policies that way – but now, the media follows Trump, she said.“If you don’t capitulate to what Trump and his enablers and his supporters are looking for, then they’ll shut you out,” Millican said. Since his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his influence has only increased, and “now he has a stronger control over the entire media ecosystem than he did previously”, she added.As rightwing outlets rise, the stories they cover differ more from what’s on mainstream news, furthering the bubbles a divided United States lives within. While in years past, you’d find different takes on the day’s news in left- and right-leaning outlets, you’ll now find stories that exist solely on rightwing media, Millican said.“It’s like every day is a new conspiracy or a new attack, and it’s just hard to even keep up on it anymore,” she said. “Half the time, when you listen to somebody who consumes nothing but rightwing media, you have no idea what they’re talking about.”TV news and rightwing websitesTraffic to news websites, including rightwing sites, is down compared with 2020. Howard Polskin, who tracks conservative media on his site The Righting, said a few factors play into the decrease. Facebook and other Meta social media de-emphasize news content now, sending less traffic to news outlets. And 2020 had several major news events colliding: a pandemic that kept people online more, nationwide protests over racial justice and a hotly contested election.Polskin tracks monthly visits to rightwing sites and produces traffic reports. The top 10 for August 2024: Fox, Outkick (a sports and commentary site owned by Fox), Newsmax, Epoch Times, National Review, Washington Times, Daily Wire, TheBlaze, Washington Examiner and Daily Caller. Gateway Pundit is not far behind, and InfoWars, the once-maligned site headed by bankrupted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, is in the top 20.View image in fullscreenNo single star has taken the place that Carlson or Limbaugh once held. Some conservatives told the Guardian they stopped watching Fox as often after Carlson left or because the network isn’t Maga enough. Fox agreed to pay $787m to settle a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over defamation claims for spreading lies about the voting machine company’s role the 2020 election. Carlson abruptly left the network shortly after the settlement, and he has claimed his firing came as a result of the settlement. Fox denies that his removal had anything to do with the Dominion case.Frank Lipsett, a 63-year-old from the south Bronx who works as a residential housing superintendent, said he watches Fox because it’s “the most honest and most informative outlet, though I’m not saying they are perfect”.Like many on the right, he has stopped reading mainstream newspapers because “they are not telling the truth.” He said he sometimes reads the New York Post, a rightwing tabloid paper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the same owner as Fox.Another paper, Epoch Times, a far-right and anti-China outlet associated with the Falun Gong religion, continues to rank highly among conservative news outlets despite a justice department lawsuit that alleges it operates as a money laundering and cryptocurrency scam. Its stories are often shared by rightwing politicians or influencers. “Their cultural impact and political impact seems much smaller than the distribution,” Polskin said.Carlene, a 58-year-old from the Upper East Side who attended the Trump rally in the Bronx, said she gets news from the Epoch Times, Daily Wire and X and sometimes tunes into CNN and MSNBC to get the other side.“I watch less Fox News now after they got rid of Tucker Carlson,” she said. “It made me think Fox was just like everyone else.”For the less online Republican, talk radio shows, especially those that run the airwaves in rural areas, play a strong role in setting the conservative message. As newspapers in rural areas have shuttered, creating a crisis in local news, these radio shows are “reaching voters that aren’t tapped into the same media spaces that we often see in these large metropolises on either coast”, Tripodi said.To fill Fox’s void on TV, some conservatives have turned to Newsmax or One American News Network, which are farther to the right than Fox.“One American News Network and Newsmax did a very good job at establishing themselves as a place that would verify whatever Trump was saying,” Tripodi said.David Fiedler, a 67-year-old retiree from Rock county, Wisconsin, told the Guardian at the Republican National Committee’s Protect the Vote tour in September that he and his wife don’t watch Fox or local news, but they stream podcasts by the Daily Wire or watch Rumble, the rightwing video platform.“Our biggest news thing we watch is Newsmax,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPodcasts and influencersBeyond television and news sites, a rightwing news consumer will find a growing landscape of podcasts, YouTube channels, Substack newsletters, documentary film-makers and social media influencers all trying to build a following.“For every laid-off journalist, another Substack is born,” Polskin said. “And that just … fractionalizes the news audience even more.”The top of the podcast charts on Spotify and Apple shows a host of conservatives: Shawn Ryan, Candace Owens, Carlson, Megyn Kelly.Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator, has his own podcast, and his network, the Daily Wire, hosts some of the biggest rightwing pundits. “In terms of just influence and power in the media landscape, to me, he would be someone that’s at the top of that space,” Millican said. Polskin called Shapiro the “800lb gorilla of rightwing podcasts”.Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, is also a major player. His organization is focused on turning college-age people conservative, and he’s been on a tour around the country to college campuses in recent months, in addition to his podcast and social media presence.“He’s almost become like an establishment media figure in his own right, except you would never actually see him on Fox News – his audience tends to be pretty old,” Millican said.While he doesn’t grab a huge share of the podcast market and he’s currently in prison for defying a congressional subpoena related to the January 6 investigation, Steve Bannon has an outsize influence on the right with his War Room show. He gets big-name rightwing politicians as guests and still has Trump’s ear, but he’s never cracked the top 20 in Polskin’s ratings.“Because of him, Project 2025 got on our radar last year because he was one of the early backers in hosting people who were involved with writing it, promoting the key tenants in it,” Millican said. “Small audience, but still influential audience.”Then there are also conspiracy-based websites and social media accounts from unnamed creators, such as End Wokeness, that spread rightwing attack lines that can filter up to the mainstream.David Jansen, who attended a Trump town hall event in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in August, said he watches FrankSpeech, a platform founded by pillow salesperson and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, which streams conservative content, often centered on election denialism.Social mediaAlongside the rise in rightwing influencers and outlets, social media platforms have loosened their content moderation and made changes to how they manage political content. Republican elected officials and outside legal groups have attacked platforms, government employees who interact with them and misinformation researchers, claiming a broad censorship plan is at work to limit conservative voices online.Some organizing on the right happens on closed-off apps such as Telegram, where public figures from the conservative mainstream and the far-right fringes have channels to share news and commentary.The underbelly of Telegram skews darker than other social media: the New York Times called it a “global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement”. Neo-Nazis have used the platform to coordinate their activities and have been scrambling after the app’s founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France for facilitating criminal activity on the app, Frontline reported.But rightwing organizing isn’t happening solely in far-flung corners of the internet. There is increased rumor-making and amplification on Musk’s X, including by Musk himself, who has shared a wide variety of election-related falsehoods. Trump returned to the platform last year after he was kicked off after the insurrection, but he still posts mostly on Truth Social, where he often rants in all-caps, shares clips from his rallies or reposts content from rightwing media who boost his campaign.Munoz, one of the Bronx Trump rally attendees, uses Telegram and Truth Social. Munoz loves Musk and his changes to X because “you can talk freely now”, he said. “I left Facebook and Instagram because they don’t let you talk.”Ed Pilkington and Alice Herman contributed reporting to this story More

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      in US Politics

      His socialist podcast became a surprise hit. Now he’s an uncommitted Democratic delegate

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      View image in fullscreenThe elected officials, party functionaries, staffers and donors descending on Chicago for the most rollicking Democratic national convention in more than half a century will welcome an unlikely guest. Daniel Denvir, who as host of the socialist podcast The Dig regularly criticizes the Democratic party from its left, will attend as an alternate Rhode Island delegate for the uncommitted movement, a nationwide effort to pressure the Democrats to change course on the war in Gaza.The movement has shifted its focus to Kamala Harris after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Denvir is a forceful voice on the topic, having spent the last 10 months honing and broadcasting a leftist perspective on the US role in the Middle East. The pivot to focus on Palestine has culminated in Thawra, a 16-part, 40-hour conversation with the historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti on Arab radical movements that has spanned five months of programming.The link between on-the-ground organizing and historical analysis is at the heart of The Dig’s political education project. “I had long thought that the academic left was far too cloistered from the activist left in the United States,” Denvir recalls of the show’s founding impetus, “and that activists and organizers outside of academia would greatly benefit from understanding the world better in their efforts to change it.”View image in fullscreenIn the show’s near-decade of life, it has become a crucial hub of the left media ecosystem, with political guests including Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders and the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis joined by Marxist academics such as David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Silvia Federici.In the aftermath of 7 October, listenership has leapt, with October downloads up about 150% from the month prior. That bump came thanks to episodes like one on the history of Hamas, Germany’s bizarre relationship with Israel, and historical tensions between Zionism and anti-Zionism within the Jewish diaspora, which together have been downloaded a quarter of a million times.The Dig was born into a moment of growth of the American left: the Democratic Socialists of America were expanding, American attitudes toward capitalism were cooling, and Trump’s presidency was propelling protests and resistance movements. It has matured alongside surging nationwide support for unions, rising labor militancy on campuses and youthful demonstrations against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.The Dig’s listeners are “overwhelmingly sharp, interesting people, committed to doing important work to transform the world, all over the world. What do they need to know?” Denvir says, in explaining how he chooses his subjects. “I’m trying to map out the terrain.”Denvir’s visit to Chicago for the DNC will bring his intensive study of the history of the Middle East to bear on the current political moment. “We continue to witness constant massacres of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli military with American weapons. It’s clear that the administration’s policy is not only morally abhorrent, but also driving away large numbers of voters who Kamala Harris needs to defeat Donald Trump,” Denvir says. “Our uncommitted delegation will be inviting Harris delegates from across the nation to join us in calling for an arms embargo on Israel. We speak for the majority of Democratic voters who have long supported a ceasefire.”As he reminds listeners at the end of each episode, in a cheeky nod to Marx: while other podcasts aim to understand the world, The Dig aims to change it.‘It’s empowering to people’The Dig has been focusing primarily on the war in Gaza since last October – specifically on, as Denvir describes it, undoing the “reactionary, colonialist propaganda” fueling US support for the unfolding catastrophe.“This sense that the Arab world is full of backward fundamentalists who irrationally want to do violence unto us in the US is only possible if the actual history showing that things are precisely otherwise is thoroughly mystified,” Denvir says. “Thawra is a project aimed at the very heart of the mystifications that have sustained a century-plus of colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East and that has led to the current genocide in Gaza.”Early experience attuned Denvir to narratives emerging from outside Washington. He cut his teeth in media freelancing in Ecuador, where he lived in 2008 with his partner, the political scientist Thea Riofrancos. When they returned to the US, he worked as a staff reporter for the Philadelphia City Paper, and – after moving in 2015 to Providence for Riofrancos’s job – cobbled together piecemeal writing work in a hollowing-out digital news ecosystem. As an experiment, he made a scuffling effort to kick the podcast off in September of that year, without finding much direction: one of the guests on his first episode was an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason.During that election season, Denvir campaigned for Bernie Sanders and joined the growing Democratic Socialists of America. The podcast found its footing, Denvir recalls, amid “Trump’s election in the context of my own unemployment and lack of a clear path as a journalist”. It was soon picked up by Jacobin magazine, where it is still hosted.Denvir’s aim was to “translate the intellectual and academic left to a broader audience”, he says, addressing its persistent gap with activists and organizers – a gap he found less pronounced in Latin America. “There shouldn’t be a hard divide between organizing and analysis or theorization,” Denvir says. “Organizing is a way to test those theories and see what works and what doesn’t.”Initially, Denvir invited journalists, scholars and organizers to discuss “American class warfare” in the form of its punitive immigration system, mass incarceration, and social and labor movements. In the years since, Denvir began doing more interviews with book authors, becoming something of a socialist Terry Gross.The show has also become more international: even before the turn to Palestine, Denvir conducted multipart interviews on the history of Iran, China, and the relationship between Cuba and southern Africa. Though he lacks formal graduate education, he evinces a professor’s comfort with critical theory and its vocabulary. His voice is schoolboyish and bright, his delivery considered, and he occasionally breaks out in small fits of laughter in reaction to his interlocutors’ – and his own – just-so points.View image in fullscreenIf its themes seem at first blush seem disparate, the show coheres by finding the connectedness of sundry struggles for liberation. “Labor or housing or immigrant rights or anti-carceral or anti-cop organizing, all of that is at its best when it’s systemically aligned with a broader struggle for socialist transformation, and a broader understanding of the capitalist order,” Denvir says.“Everything he does he brings the same care to. That itself is part of his political analysis that everything matters,” says Riofrancos of Denvir. “Every person’s important, every issue is important, everything requires care and attention, everything has a history. Everything has a struggle behind it.”His urge toward comprehensiveness means that episodes often run above the two-hour mark, occasionally approaching three. “I’m pushing the boundaries of what people think is possible, or reasonable, on a podcast,” he says. But anything less would mean for a fundamentally different podcast. I pointed out to Denvir that this length puts him in league with Joe Rogan. The difference, he says, is that “I don’t smoke weed until after I get off air”.The show’s great success is in achieving a scholarly rigor that’s accessible to the masses. Riofrancos, who as senior adviser to The Dig consults with Denvir on question lists and the show’s direction, says guests regularly thank Denvir for his especially close reads, often comparing the experience to their dissertation defenses.Yet “you can be someone that does not have academic formation and listen to his podcast and become more intellectual and knowledgeable. I think that’s empowering to people,” says Riofrancos. “When you listen, you feel like you’re getting smarter, you feel like you’re touching something that’s new to you.‘I’ve learned something I can use’Astra Taylor, a film-maker, writer and co-founder of the Debt Collective debtors’ union, first appeared on The Dig in 2018 to discuss a book she’d co-authored on Hannah Arendt. She was won over by Denvir’s close attention to the art of interviewing, they became friends, and she has since come to guest-host the show, including interviewing Denvir about his own book All-American Nativism in 2020. Like Riofrancos, she sees the show as being “not just smart” but also “empowering”.“You exit a Dig interview and you’re like: ‘I’ve learned something I can use to be a part of this bigger socialist movement, that over the course of history has changed the world,’” Taylor says. “We might be losing right now, we might be in an electoral morass, but when I take this long perspective I see that people have made it through similarly complicated, fraught periods, that people have transcended their circumstances, that people have been unrelenting in their quest to build power.”The Dig’s backlog of episodes reads as an index of how the left interpreted crucial political events over the last eight years. A two-part episode on higher education in crisis and university unionism closely followed my own graduate workers’ union’s six-week strike in the winter of 2022, helping me to contextualize that charged experience. The late Mike Davis, whose The Monster at Our Door analyzed the threat of a global virus outbreak, came on for an episode at the outset of the Covid pandemic to situate the moment; when the George Floyd protests broke out three months later, he came back to discuss Prisoners of the American Dream, his treatment of the destructive effect of racism on US socialist and labor politics. Adjacent episodes more directly spoke to demands to defund police and the context of the uprising.As the show has become more popular, Denvir has himself turned more directly toward building power. In 2020, after throwing himself into the Sanders campaign, Denvir argued for retooling that campaign’s infrastructure to fight more lastingly for social and economic justice. At the state level, he and other veterans of the campaign co-founded Reclaim RI, which has become a vehicle for tenant organizing and pursuing housing justice in Rhode Island.Joe Shekarchi, speaker of the Rhode Island house of representatives, credits Reclaim RI with playing an important role in addressing the state’s housing woes, including authorizing $10m toward launching a first-of-its-kind public housing developer at the state level. “Dan is a gentleman. He’s polite,” says Shekarchi. “I consider myself a moderate; I’m sure he would consider himself a progressive, but he’s someone I can sit down and have a productive conversation with, come to an agreement and work collaboratively to get whatever the issue is over the goal line.”View image in fullscreenThis summer, Denvir is taking his productive conversations on the road. On 26 July, he co-hosted a live episode in London interviewing the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the political scientist Laleh Khalili, on Palestine and international politics. This month, he will travel to the DNC; two weeks later, he will tape a live episode at the Socialism 2024 conference, also in Chicago, on the geopolitics of energy transition.Each of these disparate geographies and themes is of a larger piece. The world as interpreted by The Dig is deeply interrelated, comprehensible through close study and changeable insofar as it can be understood. The convention is the next opportunity to put that framework into action.“We can’t win social democratic reforms on the domestic front without challenging US power abroad,” Denvir says. “We are confronting climate change, the genocide in Gaza and increasingly violent great power rivalries: we need a global program that acts in concert with progressive forces around the world.” More

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      Stephen Bannon Plans to Record His Podcast and Then Report to Prison

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      The recording will be his last for four months, but the longtime adviser to Donald J. Trump has no intention of surrendering his influence.Immediately before reporting for a four-month sentence in federal prison on Monday, Stephen K. Bannon, the longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, will host the two final hours of his podcast from just outside the low-security facility in Danbury, Conn.“We’ll be as close to the prison as we can possibly get,” said Mr. Bannon in a high-spirited interview over the weekend. And when the taping, which he cast as an unsubtle troll pointed at the Justice Department, is concluded, “I’ll walk across the street and surrender.”Mr. Bannon on Friday lost his last-ditch bid to avoid incarceration, after the Supreme Court denied a request to postpone the sentence while he appealed a jury verdict that found him guilty of contempt for ignoring a congressional subpoena. As a result, the very public figure will remain out of view — and off the air — until just a few days before the Nov. 5 election.But the right wing firebrand insists that swapping his studio mic for a prison job, and his trademark double-collared shirts for government khakis, will have little impact on his influential “War Room” podcast. In fact, he claims, it will “only get bigger and more powerful” while he’s in custody.He has prepared for this moment for months, Mr. Bannon said, enlisting a team of nearly 20 guest hosts to continue pumping out the show, which streams its distinctive stew of unvaryingly pro-Trump political patter for four hours a day, Monday through Friday, plus two additional hours on Saturdays.That group includes Andrew Giuliani, the son of Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani; Mr. Bannon’s daughter, Maureen; Noor bin Laden, the niece of Osama bin Laden, who is known for her belief in conspiracy theories; and Jeffrey Clark, who served in the Justice Department under Mr. Trump and faces criminal charges in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss there. They’ll be responsible for managing the stream of Republican politicians, consultants, media figures, pollsters, policy wonks, donors, intellectuals and economists who use “War Room” as a bullhorn aimed directly at what is arguably Mr. Trump’s most loyal and engaged base of support.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Trump Says He Would Give Green Cards to Foreign College Students After Graduation

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      Donald J. Trump said he would push for a program that would automatically give green cards to foreign college students in America after they graduate, a reversal from restrictions he enacted as president on immigration by high-skilled workers and students to the United States.Appearing with the host David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor who backs the former president’s 2024 campaign, on a podcast that aired Thursday, Mr. Trump repeated his frequent criticism of high levels of immigration as an “invasion of our country.” He was then pressed by Jason Calacanis, another investor who hosts the podcast, to “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America.”“I do promise, but I happen to agree,” Mr. Trump said, adding “what I will do is — you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges.”Mr. Trump suggested that he had wanted to enact such a policy while in office but “then we had to solve the Covid problem.” The Trump administration invoked the pandemic to enact many of the immigration restrictions that officials had wanted to put in place earlier in Mr. Trump’s term.Mr. Trump also lamented “stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here, they had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can’t — they go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places. And they become multibillionaires.” Mr. Trump’s comments stood in contrast to the immigration policy he adopted while in office and were a direct overture to wealthy business leaders whom he is courting as donors and supporters of his campaign. Mr. Sacks hosted a fund-raiser this month for the former president in San Francisco, the beating heart of the liberal tech industry, that raised about $12 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More