Deconstructed With Mehdi Hasan

On Sunday, a former Facebook data scientist went on 60 Minutes to accuse the company of defrauding its advertising customers and deliberately engineering social division and ethnic strife. Then on Monday, the entire Facebook product family went offline for six hours: Instagram, Whatsapp, and of course Facebook.com itself.Then on Wednesday, big tech critic and antitrust advocate Jonathan Kanter got a highly favorable reception from the Senate Commerce Subcommittee, suggesting that he will likely be confirmed as head of the antitrust division at the Justice Department. So where does all this leave Zuckerberg, Inc.? Conservative Partnership Institute Policy Director Rachel Bovard and economist and author Matt Stoller join Ryan Grim to discuss where big tech antitrust is headed.https://join.theintercept.com/donate/now  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, progressives in the House of Representatives were able to stall an effort by the centrist dark money group No Labels to separate the infrastructure portion of President Biden’s reconciliation bill from the tax reform and social spending components, hoping that the latter could then be defeated at a later date. One of the leaders of the effort, New Jersey representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, joins Ryan Grim to discuss where the fight to pass the bill goes from here.https://join.theintercept.com/donate/now  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In December, Congresswoman Marcia Fudge was nominated to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development by president-elect Biden. Former Ohio state senator and surrogate for both the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders campaigns Nina Turner quickly emerged as the candidate to beat in the race to fill her seat. Yet when the dust of the primary had cleared on August 3rd, Shontel Brown, the favored candidate of the Democratic Party establishment, was victorious. Turner joins Ryan Grim to discuss what went wrong, her future political ambitions, and what progressives can learn from the race.https://join.theintercept.com/donate/now  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The next few weeks will be crucial for the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which is central to Joe Biden’s agenda. Pennsylvania congressman Brendan Boyle of the House Ways and Means Committee joins Ryan Grim to discuss how the bill could reshape the American economy.https://join.theintercept.com/donate/now  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s become a familiar pattern for West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin: first, announce your opposition to a Biden legislative priority. Second, extract some concessions on the theory that this will attract Republican support. Finally, announce that you’ve had a change of heart and can support the bill, which is of course meaningless since the longed for Republican votes never materialize and no floor vote ever happens. Now Manchin appears to be doing the same old dance with Biden’s budget plan. Whatever the merits of this political strategy, it has certainly turned Manchin into the and most talked-about Senator among DC pundits. But who is he really, and what do West Virginians think of him? West Virginia native Stephen Smith, founder of West Virginia Can’t Wait, joins Ryan Grim to discuss his state’s senior senator.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

More than 45 dead after remnants of Hurricane Ida slammed the Northeast. In Louisiana, where the hurricane hit days before, hundreds of thousands remain without electricity. Meanwhile, massive fires in the West have burned for weeks. Amid all this catastrophe, we continue building new infrastructure to prop up a fossil fuel industry, barreling us toward one climate disaster after another. The most egregious example at the moment is energy company Enbridge’s Line 3 project. Intercept reporter Alleen Brown and attorney and founder of the Giniw Collective Tara Houska join Ryan Grim to discuss Line 3. It's a massive pipeline that snakes across the Canadian border, through Minnesota wetlands, and under the Mississippi River, all so it can transport tar sands oil — the dirtiest of the dirtiest energy — to be refined and, for much of it, exported.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul on Thursday struck crowds that had gathered in hope of escaping the country. ISIS-K, an Afghanistan-based offshoot of the Islamic State, claimed responsibility for the attacks. Journalist Andrew Quilty joins Ryan Grim to talk about the history of ISIS-K and the aftermath of the attacks. Then, Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar discusses the situation confronting refugees from Afghanistan looking to come to the U.S.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A media consensus has quickly emerged around the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, and it goes like this: whatever its merits in the abstract, in its execution the whole thing has been a chaotic debacle. On this week’s Deconstructed, Ryan Grim talks to journalist and author Anand Gopal and to politician and former US army major Richard Ojeda. They discuss what the media are missing, and why the Afghanistan exit is long overdue.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, released the first part of its latest report on the state of the Earth’s climate. It details with greater certainty than ever before the links between human activity and extreme weather patterns: fires, floods, and rising sea levels. Journalist David Wallace-Wells and sociologist Dana Fisher join Ryan Grim to discuss the takeaways from the new report.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Last week, congress failed to pass an extension to the COVID-19 eviction moratorium. In response several members of the house, including congresswomen Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, camped out on the steps of the capitol in an effort to pressure the Biden administration into executive action. Congresswoman Bush joins Ryan Grim to discuss this week’s action and how her own life story has informed her understanding of poverty and eviction.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The assasination earlier this month of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse is raising new questions about the threat posed by international mercenaries. It also casts a new light on a story The Intercept published last month that revealed the existence of a 2020 coup plot against the newly elected president of Bolivia, Luis Arcé — successor to the country’s long-serving leftist president Evo Morales. As in Haiti, the plot would have seen foreign mercenaries deployed against an elected leader. Ryan Grim and Laurence Blair, who worked together on that story, look back on their reporting.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Last Friday President Biden announced a sweeping executive order aimed at ending what he called a 40-year “experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power.” Attorney and law professor Zephyr Teachout joins Ryan Grim to discuss the resurgence of antitrust under the Biden presidency.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

25 years before he first ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, 31-year-old Dennis Kucinich was elected mayor of Cleveland, Ohio — at the time, that made him the youngest mayor of a major city in the country. His tenure would be dominated by the fight to prevent the privatization of the city’s public electrical utility, a fight that would pit Kucinich against powerful politicians, the Cleveland Trust bank, and even the mob. Kucinich tells the story of the fight to save Municipal Light in his new book, “The Division of Light and Power.”  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Since leaving prison in 2017, former intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been busy. She ran unsuccessfully for senate in her home state of Maryland, became a Twitch streamer, and was jailed for contempt after refusing to testify in a US government case against Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Manning joins Ryan Grim and Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein to talk about prison, prospects for whistleblowers in the Biden era, and what she’s been up to since her release.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Intercept's Lee Fang obtained audio of the powerful West Virginia senator on a call with the centrist political group No Labels.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For decades, economic policymakers have viewed full employment as a scourge to be avoided at all costs, betokening as it does the grim spectre of inflation. If his words are to be believed, Joe Biden wants to break with that consensus and aim for full employment. Economist James Galbraith joins Ryan Grim to discuss.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

As part of his “Build Back Better” plan, President Biden has promised to “advance racial equity across the American economy.” In her new book, “The Whiteness of Wealth,” Emory law professor Dorothy Brown argues that meaningfully addressing the racial wealth gap will require wide-ranging reform of the US tax code. Ryan Grim talks to professor Brown about what her research shows.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Republicans in Arizona are hoping to overturn their state’s presidential election result, creating a template that they can apply in Georgia, Wisconsin, and beyond. Meanwhile Mitch McConnell (to no one’s surprise) is making it clear that no Democratic policy objective is going to make it past his filibuster. Does a strategy of legislative obstruction and retroactive electioneering hold any promise for the party? Activist Lauren Windsor and former Senate staffer Eli Zupnick join Ryan Grim to discuss.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On May 7, Israeli police raided the Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem during the evening prayer. Hamas responded a few days later by launching rockets from Gaza into Israel. Israel retaliated with its own strikes, and the violence escalated. Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian-American journalist based in the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. She joins Ryan Grim to discuss this latest flareup in the Israel-Palestine conflict and what US media are missing.The video referenced at the end of the show is Mehdi Hasan’s Blowback: How Israel Helped Create Hamas.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When Berta Cáceres was murdered in 2016, she was the leading environmental activist in Honduras and, arguably, the world. A member of the indigenous Lenca people and the founder of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Peoples of Honduras, or COPINH, Cáceres was the most formidable opponent of a powerful energy company called Desarrollos Energeticos Sociedad Anónima, or DESA. Their Agua Zarca dam project would have occupied Lenca land and interfered with waterways sacred to their community. Cáceres worked tirelessly to increase scrutiny of DESA and turn the people of Honduras against the dam, until the early hours of March 3, 2016, when someone had her killed. At the time, David Castillo sat atop DESA’s executive ranks as president and CEO. He is now on trial in the Honduran Supreme Court, charged with ordering Cáceres’s death. Whoever plotted her killing likely underestimated the amount of attention it would bring, drawing Honduras into the international spotlight to a degree unseen since the country’s 2009