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Ron DeSantis Says, “The Left Made Me Do It”; Plus Our Oscar Preview With John Powers

On this episode of the Start Making Sense podcast, Chris Lehmann talks about the DeSantis book, and John Powers complains about the Academy Awards.

Jon Wiener and Start Making Sense

March 9, 2023

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s book The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, for sale on the store shelfs in New York, United States on March 01, 2023.(Fatih Aktas / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Ron DeSantis has written a political autobiography, The Courage to Be Free. The Nation’s DC Bureau Chief Chris Lehmann calls it “a paranoid rant disguised as campaign memoir.” Chris joins us on this episode of Start Making Sense to discuss it.

Also: Sunday is Oscar night in America and, as usual, we have a lot of complaints about the nominations. So does John Powers, critic at large on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. We talk about this year’s films we didn’t like—and some we thought were wonderful.

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Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


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