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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, February 8, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:14
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| Guests:
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| Luis Feliz Leon, Kieran Knutson
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| Topics
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| Minneapolis: from outrage to collective power
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Minneapolis is the epicenter of Trump’s escalating war on immigrants and Blue cities. The administration has deployed thousands of federal agents there to terrorize immigrant communities, publicly executing the protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti for standing up for their neighbors. Tens of millions of horrified viewers have watched bystander videos, frame by frame. Twin Cities residents have shown the world what popular resistance looks like, in sub-zero temperatures, organizing mutual aid, protecting targeted neighbors, and confronting Federal Agents at every turn.
Tens of thousands took to the streets in Minneapolis and around the country on January 23 and January 30 in “no work, no school, no shopping” actions. It wasn’t technically a general strike but it demonstrated how unions, clergy, and community could create the organizing infrastructure to transform outrage into collective power, building a movement and a new strike culture.
We explore how all this happened and what organizers believe comes next with labor journalist Luis Feliz Leon and President of Minneapolis CWA Local 7250 Kieran Frazier Knutson, who bring us stories from daily life under ICE occupation. Feliz Leon situates this Minneapolis moment in the history and theory of mass strikes. Knutson explains the role of mutual aid, the strategic targeting of corporations, and the push toward a worker assembly to shape the next steps. They show how ordinary people organized democratically to vanquish fear, turning moral shock into collective power.
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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, January 25, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:12
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| Guests:
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| Robert Brenner, Dylan Riley
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| Topics
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| Trumpism as Counter-Revolution in a Stagnant World.
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Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley on the deeper meaning of Trump’s return to power.
Is Trump just a narcissistic strongman — or the carrier of a coherent counter-revolutionary project?
Brenner and Riley argue that Trumpism is not a return to the past, but an attempt to reorganize society for a future in which capitalism can no longer grow — only command, police, and exclude.
They trace the roots of Trump Two to decades of economic stagnation, the collapse of US hegemony, the failure of Bidenomics, and a deep class split between credentialed and non-credentialed workers.
They see Trumpism as a social revolution aimed not against capital, but against the credentialed middle and working class — built on four pillars: attacks on universities, expansion of the security state, the use of AI as class warfare, and the dismantling of the international order.
Tune in for a sobering conversation about Trumpism as counter-revolution in a stagnant world.
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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, January 18, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:12
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| Guests:
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| Kevan Harris, Yassamine Mather
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| Iran's Protest Movement
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Over the past several weeks, Iran has experienced its most serious wave of protests since the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022. What began as an economic protest quickly turned political, with chants calling for an end to the Islamic Republic — and the most brutal response of repression in the history of the Islamic Republic, with killings, mass arrests, executions, and an internet blackout.
UCLA political sociologist Kevan Harris reconstructs the spark that ignited the protests -- a technocratic reform perceived as an unjust tax, adding to economic and political grievances that exploded into a broader uprising.
Iranian scholar and political activist Yassamine Mather examines the brutal repression that followed, and the dangerous media distortions surrounding the uprising as exile groups promote monarchist fantasies and openly flirt with US and Israeli intervention. Mather says Iranian protesters overwhelmingly reject both the Islamic Republic and the shah’s dictatorship — and foreign intervention threatens to crush the very movement it claims to support.
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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, January 11, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:12
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| Guests:
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| Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos, Denys Pilash
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| Topics
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| Venezuela, Ukraine: Naked Imperialism & Spheres of Interest
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The U.S. assault on Venezuela on January 3 wasn’t justified with talk of democracy or humanitarian intervention. Trump said the quiet part out loud: oil, resources, and power. Brazilian political economist Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos argues this new “Donroe Doctrine” is openly transactional, unapologetically imperial, and a sign of a declining hegemon turning to force to secure oil, minerals, and supply chains. Bastos explains why Venezuela was chosen as the first target, how China looms behind U.S. strategy, and why the Maduro regime — authoritarian, corrupt, and deeply anti-democratic — cannot be defended as socialist without emptying socialism of meaning.
Denys Pilash, a member of Ukraine’s democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh, joins from Kyiv under blackout conditions. Drawing on his scholarly work on Venezuela and his lived experience of Russia’s invasion, Pilash argues that opposing U.S. imperialism and opposing authoritarian regimes like Maduro’s are inseparable struggles — and that accepting imperial “spheres of influence” destroys the case against Russia’s war on Ukraine.
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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, December 21, 2025 10:00 am
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1:00:13
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| Guests:
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| Oscar Mendoza, Pabo Abufom
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| Topics
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| Chile elects far right extremist: what happened?
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Chile has just elected its most extreme far-right president since the Pinochet dictatorship. José Antonio Kast won the December 14 runoff by a commanding margin — a stunning reversal in a country that, just a few years ago, experienced a massive social uprising over the unaffordability of life and extreme inequality. The social revolt ended with the pandemic lockdown, but the following year a broad leftist coalition swept into power, electing the 34 year old former radical student leader Gabriel Boric, whose government promised to bury neoliberalism once and for all.
How did Chile move so quickly from an anti-neoliberal social rebellion to the return of the hard right? Was this a vote for authoritarianism — or a vote against insecurity, inflation, and political stalemate? What does Kast’s victory tell us about the global resurgence of the far right, from Latin America to Europe and the United States?
We examine Chile’s political reversal with two Chilean analysts: Oscar Mendoza explains this electoral shift by looking at the failed constitutional process, the role of mandatory voting, media panic over crime and immigration, and the institutional constraints Kast will face in office. Pablo Abufom Silva situates Kast’s victory in a longer historical trajectory, arguing that this is the first democratic government of pinochetismo: a project combining authoritarian neoliberalism, moral conservatism and anticommunism, now aligned with a global far right resurgence.
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