‘It Can’t All Be Bernie’

‘It Can’t All Be Bernie’

The candidate with John Nichols, Adam Hochschild on deportation, and John Powers on The Irishman.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
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Bernie Sanders says it will take a movement to change America: “It can’t all be Bernie.” John Nichols comments on his interview with the candidate, who is now back in second place in the polls. And we play clips from the interview, originally broadcast on the Next Left podcast.

Also: deporting the immigrants called “undesirable”—now, under Trump, and a hundred years ago. Historian Adam Hochschild notes that it’s the 100th anniversary of the Palmer Raids, when J Edgar Hoover got his start—and where one heroic Labor Department official blocked thousands of deportations.

Plus: Martin Scorcese’s new film The Irishman opens on Netflix this week; it claims to tell the true story of the murder of Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the Teamsters Union, who disappeared in 1974. But nobody who’s studied that history thinks the movie is right about what happened to Hoffa. Does that fact change our judgment about the film? John Powers comments; he’s critic at large for Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets. 

Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.  

As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war. 

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Start Making Sense Start 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.  


Jon Wiener Jon 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.


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