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in US PoliticsHis 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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in ElectionsStephen Bannon Plans to Record His Podcast and Then Report to Prison
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 ElectionsTrump Says He Would Give Green Cards to Foreign College Students After Graduation
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
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in US PoliticsTrump tells Logan Paul he used AI to ‘so beautifully’ rewrite a speech
Donald Trump has said he used a speech generated by artificial intelligence (AI) after being impressed by the content.The former US president, whose oratory is noted for its rambling, off-the-cuff style but also for its demagoguery, made the claim in an interview with Logan Paul’s podcast in which he lauded AI as “a superpower” but also warned of its potential dangers.He said the rewritten speech came during a meeting with one of the industry’s “top people”, whom he did not identify.“I had a speech rewritten by AI out there, one of the top people,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna make a speech? Yeah?’ He goes, click, click, click, and like, 15 seconds later, he shows me my speech that’s written that’s great, so beautifully. I said, ‘I’m gonna use this.’ I’ve never seen anything like it.” Trump did not say at what event he had used the AI-generated speech.He predicted that AI’s oratorical gifts could sound the death knell for speech writers, long a part of Washington’s political landscape.“One industry I think that will be gone are these wonderful speechwriters,” he said. I’ve never seen anything like it, and so quickly, a matter of literally minutes, it’s done. It’s a little bit scary.”Asked what he said to his speech writer, Trump jokingly responded, “You’re fired,” a line associated with The Apprentice, the TV reality show that helped propel his political rise.Trump, the Republican presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, also acknowledged that AI had dangers, especially in regard to deepfakes. He warned of an imaginary situation where a faked voice warned a foreign power that a US nuclear attack was being launched, possibly triggering a retaliatory strike.“If you’re the president of the United States, and you announced that 13 missiles have been sent to, let’s not use the name of a country,” he said. “We have just sent 13 nuclear missiles heading to somewhere, and they will hit their targets in 12 minutes and 59 seconds, and you’re that country.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe said he had asked the entrepreneur Elon Musk – referring to him by his first name – if Russia or China would be able to identify that the attack warning was fake and was told that they would have to use a code to check its veracity.“Who the hell’s going to check. You got, like, 12 minutes – let’s check the code,” he said. “So what do they do when they see this? They have maybe a counterattack. It’s so dangerous in that way.” More
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in ElectionsBefore ‘S-Town’ Made Him Famous, Clock Lovers Knew Him Well
John B. McLemore, the brilliant and quirky star of the hit podcast “S-Town,” is the center of a show highlighting his work in the art of clock restoration.John B. McLemore, a profanely outspoken, brilliant and troubled restorer of antique clocks, emerged a national figure in 2017 with the podcast “S-Town.” As a horologist — a repairer of devices that measure time — he restored intricate and rare pieces in a workshop at his family homestead in rural western Alabama.But that was just part of the story.In short order, “S-Town” hit 40 million downloads, and has since surpassed 100 million, making it among the most downloaded podcasts.For those who missed this unusual tale, there will be no major spoilers here. It’s enough to say that McLemore, and many in his orbit, were vaulted from obscurity to sometimes painful visibility.(Tyler Goodson, a prominent character in the podcast, was killed in a police shootout in December. Jeff Dodson, the mayor of Woodstock, the hamlet where “S-Town” takes place, said he hasn’t received an update on the police investigation of the shooting.)Before “S-Town,” McLemore was known to collectors of rare clocks, earning fame as an unlikely genius who could diagnose mechanical trouble and revive one-of-a-kind antique timepieces.One of those collectors, William R. Tatum, was close to “John B.,” as friends called him. Tatum — referred to only as Bill in the podcast — entrusted McLemore with many of his prized clocks. An exhibition of 34 of those pieces, all restored by McLemore, runs through April 30 at the National Watch & Clock Museum in Columbia, Pa. 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 ElectionsFamily Meeting
On This Week’s Episode:Your mother and I have something we want to talk with you about.Anna PariniThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling and provides news, depth and serendipity. It is available to Times news subscribers on iOS. If you haven’t already, download the app and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Our new audio app is home to “This American Life,” the award-winning program hosted by Ira Glass. New episodes debut in our app a day earlier than in the regular podcast feed, and we also have an archive of the show. The app includes a “Best of ‘This American Life’” section with some of our favorite bite-size clips, so you can enjoy the show even if you don’t have a lot of time. More
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in ElectionsTrue-Crime Podcasts About Trump Are Everywhere
MSNBC, NPR, Vox Media and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution are all aiming to capitalize on interest in the criminal cases against President Donald J. Trump with the shows.True crime is among the most popular genres in podcasting. One of the biggest stories in the coming months is the wave of criminal charges facing former President Donald J. Trump.The result: a boomlet of podcasts dedicated to the criminal cases against him.MSNBC, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, NPR, Vox Media and The First TV, an upstart conservative media company, have all introduced or are about to start new shows examining Mr. Trump’s courtroom travails as he campaigns to win back the White House.On MSNBC’s “Prosecuting Donald Trump,” the legal commentators Andrew Weissmann and Mary McCord offer analysis gleaned from their years serving as prosecutors. A recent episode of “Breakdown,” from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, includes a newsy interview with Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Recently on “Trump’s Trials,” the NPR host Scott Detrow discussed whether Mr. Trump could claim presidential immunity.The criminal charges against Mr. Trump — brought by state prosecutors in New York and Georgia, as well as in two federal indictments — involve allegations of election interference, his role in the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, his handling of sensitive documents and payments to cover up a sex scandal. Mr. Trump denies any wrongdoing.Many of the hosts interviewed by The New York Times cited the newsworthiness of the story — a former president and a leading candidate for the office is facing a legal onslaught while battling for the White House — as the impetus to go wall to wall with dedicated podcasts.“He is the far and away front-runner to the nomination and has a real chance of being president again,” Mr. Detrow said. “That, to me, is an enormous legal story, an enormous political story.”But there is a significant potential economic upside as well: capturing a slice of the $2.4 billion that advertisers are expected to spend on podcasts in 2024, according to the data firm eMarketer. For years, news organizations have benefited financially from the public’s interest in Mr. Trump — colloquially known as the “Trump bump.”“The number of users is up, but the number of people vying for those users in terms of dollars is also way up,” said Chris Balfe, founder of The First TV.Mr. Trump’s legal challenges present an unusual twist on the true-crime genre, which often focuses on grisly murders or dramatic heists. “Serial,” a podcast from the creators of “This American Life,” was a pioneer of the category, which has also included entrants like “Exit Scam” (about a vanished cryptocurrency mogul) and “Last Seen,” a suspenseful yarn about the theft of 13 irreplaceable artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. (The New York Times Company now owns Serial Productions, maker of “Serial.”)The Trump cases, by contrast, involve complicated questions about the Constitution and democracy. Adding to the complexity: They span state and federal jurisdictions in Florida, Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C.Podcasts are an ideal format to explain the nuances to the public, because they give journalists the time and space to examine complicated issues at length, Mr. Balfe said. They also allow news organizations to create a listener destination for coverage quickly and relatively inexpensively, with two mics and a simple distribution feed for Spotify and Apple Podcasts, he said.“You don’t have to go lease a beautiful studio on Sixth Avenue and hire a crew and all this other stuff,” Mr. Balfe said. “A podcast is a low-floor, high-ceiling way to start a new product. And if it works, it can be very successful, very quickly.”Last year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the largest newspaper in Georgia, dedicated the latest season of its true-crime podcast, “Breakdown,” to the criminal investigation. Since then, it has been all Trump, all the time, with 22 episodes on the topic since August.This year, the podcast garnered more than one million downloads, making it the newspaper’s most popular, finding audiences in Florida, California and New York, according to a spokeswoman for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The newspaper also has three full-time reporters covering Mr. Trump’s case in Fulton County, where he faces 13 felony charges, including racketeering.Tamar Hallerman, one of those reporters, co-anchors the podcast. She describes herself as a “recovering Washington correspondent.” (She was previously a reporter at Roll Call.)The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the largest newspaper in Georgia, dedicated its latest season of its true-crime podcast, “Breakdown,” to the Trump criminal investigation.Wulf Bradley for The New York Times“All of these legal cases that Trump is in the middle of are already creating a unique set of circumstances for a leading presidential candidate,” said Ms. Hallerman, who covered the 2016 presidential campaign. “This is absolutely not business as usual for the campaign press corps.”Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has dedicated much of one of his three podcasts for Vox Media to the criminal investigations facing Mr. Trump. Mr. Bharara has covered Mr. Trump’s legal issues since 2018, saying, “There’s really been no shortage of legal-based news.”Yet “the dam broke” in April, he said, after Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, brought the first criminal charges against Mr. Trump.“Every month or two, there was another one,” Mr. Bharara said. “And it became clear that that was going to be a central focus.”Political coverage of Mr. Trump should focus on the criminal investigations into the former president, rather than traditional horse-race coverage, said Timothy Crouse, whose 1973 book, “The Boys on the Bus,” about the media’s coverage of the previous year’s presidential campaign, became a classic of the genre.Investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, not campaign reporters, did the most enduring political journalism of that era, Mr. Crouse said. At the time, many campaign reporters were skeptical of those stories. He added that sustained exploration of Mr. Trump’s criminal charges would probably follow the same pattern.“Fewer political reporters might be OK, but only if that decrease were to be balanced by an increase in investigative reporters,” Mr. Crouse said. More