Ana Kasparian: Independent and Unaligned | Doomscroll

Oh, you're not going to cosign on our social policies. You're going to question our social policies. Well, we think that you're a bigot. We think you're racist.

Which side are you going to pick? And I think there are probably a lot of women who switch sides because they look at their communities. They feel unsafe. They look at one party that gaslights them about it.

You're not going to win anyone over by making your political project all about finding the heretics and purging them. I mean, these are people who voted for Obama twice. I don't think there's any self-reflection happening on the left at all right now. >> Welcome to Doomscroll.

I'm your host Joshua Cinderella. My guest is Anna Casparian, a host and executive producer of The Young Turks. In school, you're studying journalism. What was your first encounter with radical media?

What were the things that inspired you? Did you follow certain writers, books, documentaries? Like, how do you start to get interested in this field? I did not get introduced to radical media or radical thinkers really until I met Michael Brooks um the late friend that I was referring to earlier.

He was a socialist, a Marxist and he made me very uncomfortable at first because his ideas were unlike anything I had ever heard before. >> Yes. And they scared me a little bit because at that point in my life I had fully bought into the identity politics and he was very subtly pushing against it. He was so articulate, so talented.

I mean, he's he was one of the most talented communicators ever because I could try to say the same thing. I could try to make the same arguments, but there's something about me that like repulses the left when I try to make the same arguments that critique identity politics, whereas he would do it all the time and people would listen. They didn't find it repulsive, right? And it was amazing.

At the same time, he was hyperfocused on class politics and we would have these debates off camera and he would persuade me because his arguments were well thought out. They made a lot of sense and all of a sudden I get introduced to radical thinkers. You know, one of my favorite writers who's unfortunately no longer with us, Barbara Aaron Reich, absolute favorite ...