this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I'll second Geopolitical Economy Report. Also, Revolutionary Left Radio is fantastic. The host, Bre is intelligent and charismatic, but more than that he's incredible at finding great guests and doing great interviews. If the episode topic even remotely interests me, the episode itself is almost always 9/10. He is also a part of two other podcasts, Guerilla History and Red Menace, which are also both great.
Blowback has had 3 seasons, all are fantastic.
Actually Existing Socialism has some good episodes, though they haven't been around for too long.
This one isn't expressly political, but The Dollop is amazing. Both the hosts are somewhere on the left, though I'm not sure exactly where. It is easily the funniest podcast I've ever listened to.
I adore The Dollop!
Yeah I have been going between Behind the Bastards and I used to listen to I Don’t Speak German but they are on a sort of break at the moment.
Behind the Bastards is a pretty iffy podcast though. They will quite often just seemingly make up things for the sake of a narrative and are very poorly sourced.
The host of BtB (Robert Evans) is an odd guy.
There’s a lot of stuff about him and CIA ties, although we all know that type of stuff is unprovable without outright admission basically, so I don’t much credence to that.
What I do pay attention to is how he speaks, what he speaks about, who he associates with, who he condemns or celebrates, etc.
I’ll just make this as short and concise as I can. He’s very obviously libertarian in nature, and no, not that the Ayn Rand style, but the not-too-far-off vaguely-leftist “anarchists” style. He seem to understand Marxist theory, or be acquainted with it anyway, but he also seems… to… reject much of it? Which is, to me, what I’d call “not good.”
He does a lot of sussy stuff like kinda give passes to imperial soldiers of the past sometimes even seeming to glorify some of their actions. One example in my mind is the Gen Butler stuff (War is a Racket guy). His wars before his later move to the left are almost glamorized by Evans in an episode with his guest Prop. He will almost jerk off Butler for multiple sentences and then say “but of course it was for imperialism and that’s bad of course!” Ok, then why fucking build it up, call the guy a badass, etc.? It’s hard to place into words my issue with representation of these type of events. Perhaps just saying his condemnation of imperialism feels lukewarm at best sometimes, but at other times he comes off very much against imperialism. The tone and consistency is off to me.
He also takes at face value many government reported things. Small example list:
1 the CIA claims to have destroyed all records prior to some date in the 1960s or 70s (too lazy to google, the detail isn’t that important). He seems to just believe this is true and that the CIA/FBI etc. don’t have backups to backups to backups of any intelligence data and revolving around secret projects like MKUltra.
2 He fully accepted the US state dept line on Russia invading Ukraine totally for real this time (which did actually happen after saying ITS FINALLY HAPPENING for like 30 decades). Anyone who uncritically accepts state dept lines is sussy to me.
3 He seems to have no disdain for US military/US veterans. I’ve never heard him condemn people’s choice to join. He just treats it like a normal job that some people just do. I could say this is possibly from spending too much time on the US side while being an embedded journalist if I’m charitable or if I’m then I could say he’s an unapologetic pro-US imperialist.
Fuck. I ended up typing too much anyway.
I did want to avoid scaring that other guy with this sort of info on the guy, but you're 100% right, Evans has some...odd opinions for a "leftist" to say the least, and is at best controlled opposition and at worst a full on fed. He's been in active warzones in the past, so for him to just dismiss US soldier's role in imperialism is very strange indeed. He's seen firsthand the damage the US causes so I can't really imagine him taking that position without a blindly pro-US stance. He certainly does love to take CIA accounts of people at their word but is incredibly suspicious of any information that goes against the status quo.
I'm personally off the opinion that he is on the CIA payroll, he's a prominent journalist who really should know better, so he's either an idiot or a fed. And his articles are generally too well written for him to be the former.
I wasn't aware that he was a controversial figure. I picked up the podcast at the recommendation of a friend. This thread has been very informative.