Bad Faith ain’t bad at all
For this Thursday’s “Getting to Know You (Again),” I chose a progressive podcast that has both free and premium content. I listen to the free podcast, but did become a paid subscriber shortly before the 2020 election because of an interview I saw teased on Twitter and that I very much wanted to see to make up my own mind about.
Bad Faith, hosted by Briahna Joy Gray (National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders for his 2020 campaign, among many other things) Virgil Texas (who describes himself on his Twitter profile as “Public intellectual. Bestselling author”), gives in-depth commentary about issues facing the left and the country as a whole.
Some episodes feature interviews with key figures from the left, along with extended discussions between the hosts (and sometimes a guest or two) about current events and Washington politics. In other episodes, there’s not an interview but just a discussion.
The shows are largely about the issues, but there is also a lot of “banter”, which I usually find funny or interesting (I remember one episode discussed Star Trek, for example, but they talk about a wide variety of things). On occasion, Virgil comes off to me as just a little bit aloof and/or out of touch — but it’s hard to tell how much of it is an act and how much of it is actually what he’s like. It’s not enough though to turn me off from the podcast.
I find Briahna to be relatable, and her takes on politics are very close to my political leanings (or maybe I should say mine are close to hers, lol).
The episode that led me to subscribe was for an interview with a leading figure on the Left that also got me hooked on Krystal Kyle and Friends — an interview with the one and only Noam Chomsky. The full interview is only available to subscribers, but here’s a clip. It was widely discussed among progressives on the left both on shows and on social media, with some saying Bad Faith had won the (de facto) debate with Noam Chomsky, which I was skeptical of at first.
For a large part of the interview, Briahna was trying to talk to Chomsky about how to get out of the cycle of voting for the lesser of two evils — emphasizing that she was *not* saying don’t vote for Biden, but pointing out that a lot of progressives and activists didn’t feel comfortable doing so.
Noam Chomsky, normally eloquent and even-tempered, began sounding like a broken record, repeating a dozen or so times that the only decision was whether or not to take “ten minutes” (or he said “five minutes” once or twice iirc) to go to the polls and vote so we could defeat Trump if we want to have a planet left for our grandchildren.
Chomsky refused to go to a broader discussion about how to stop getting to the point every election cycle for a corporate Democrat, or why certain communities (such as African Americans) may not see the point in voting at all. I see she just tweeted about this again recently.
The main point he made that is a valid and important one in the context of the discussion, was saying that we’ve been led to believe that voting is the only thing that matters (which is, ironically, what he was effectively saying), but that it’s what activists do in-between elections that matters. He didn’t seem willing to concede, however, that some groups understandably feel like they have little to gain by voting.
I thought this interview was enlightening. I really appreciated the courage that Briahna (and a lesser extent Virgil) showed by taking on the leading intellectual of our times and, in my opinion, very clearly winning the discussion/debate.
Since the election, Chomsky seems to have gone back to his usual critiques of the entire American political system, imperialism, and ecological destruction. So he apparently during that interview, he thought it was more important to drive home (ad nauseum) the immediate action he thought was needed — voting for Biden and not letting other discussion get in the way of that goal.
That was one episode. The show is about a *lot* more than that, talking about the force the vote, the insurrection, the filibuster, I see that as I was writing this an episode about Carbon Removal just came out on their podcast feed — they’ve cover just about every hot topic on the left in the past year since they started the podcast and have a detailed discussion of it which I find interesting and informative.
If you haven’t, I definitely recommend checking Bad Faith out!
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🚨 Before you go, don’t forget to vote in the poll for which progressive org or cause will get July's $50 donation from eclecticmisc.org! It only takes a minute to vote in the poll, so hopefully Chomsky would approve. :)
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