Give Them An Argument

Last week, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti had an interesting mini-debate on whether states and cities that don't cooperate with ICE are doing something wrong on the grounds that it involves a "neo-Confederate" rejection of federal supreamcy. Ben Burgis breaks it down. Watch the 32-hour workweek video previewed at the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr35Wr0H9mM Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits rang...

Ambiguously fascist JD Vance guru Curtis Yarvin has written an odd little essay called "You Can't Handle the Truth." Ben Burgis responds! Read the essay: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/you-cant-handle-the-truth Read Matt McManus's essay on Yarvin: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/curtis-yarvin-thiel-carlyle-monarchism-reactionary Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive pos...

Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick made a classical argument against redistributing wealth and economic resources in his book "Anarchy, State & Utopia" based on a thought experiment about the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen takes it apart piece by piece. Ben Burgis discusses! Read Ben's article about this in Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2024/12/capitalism-freedom-nozick-cohen-philosophy Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gt...

Today is the 2-year anniversary of the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. Ben Burgis breaks the absurdity and evil of the way many people have tried to defend it, and puts the issue in a larger context. Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going: patreon.com/benburgis Read the weekly ...

Ben Burgis talks about his Jacobin article "Democrats are Screwing Up the Shutdown" and subsequent developments. Read the article: https://jacobin.com/2025/10/democrats-shutdown-health-care-bernie-aoc Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going: patreon.com/benburgis Read the weekly philosophy Substack: benburgis.sub...

It's Friday! Let's end the week with something fun and watch Zohran sparring with the ladies on The View about Palestine, electability, and more. Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going: patreon.com/benburgis Read the weekly philosophy Substack: benburgis.substack.com Visit benbu...

That's the claim made by Neil Vallelly in a shockingly poorly-informed article for Jacobin (reviewing Christopher Schuringa's book "A Social History of Analytical Philosophy"). Jacobin editor Nick French defended analytic philosophy in a counterpoint review of the same book ("Is Analytic Philosophy a Class Ideology?") published the same day. In this episode, Ben Burgis argues in this episode that French is correct but that the whole exchange suffers from ignoring the overlap between analytic ...

Trump's new national security directive classifies all of the following as indicators of incipient political violence that need to be investigated and disrupted before they come to fruition: • anti-Americanism, • anti-capitalism, • anti-Christianity, • support for the overthrow of the United States Government, • extremism on migration, • extremism on race, • extremism on gender • hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, • hostility towards those who hold traditi...

Ben Burgis addresses the controversy about the article he and Meagan Day wrote about political violence and free speech after the Charlie Kirk assassination, all of the ways the most tedious and unhelpful people on the Left found to miss the point, and the broader perils of this moment. Read the original article: https://jacobin.com/2025/09/charlie-kirk-murder-political-violence Follow Meagan on Twitter: @meagankday Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show Be...

We're back! This last weekend, Ben Burgis was at an international conference of socialist, communist, and labor parties in Mexico City hosted by the Partido del Trabajo (the smallest but furthest left of the three parties in Claudia Sheinbaum's coalition). He introduced Richard Wolff to the assembled delegates, and Wolff have a barn burner of a talk outlining just what's happened to American society in the last few decades. We share the video + Ben gives some background on the conference and ...

After a four-year run on the show, Producer Jake is saying goodbye. (Although presumably he'll be saying "hello" again on some future episodes as a guest.) One of his predecessors, Producer Cale, joins us to see the lad off. Jay Zeroni, who's never been a GTAA producer but is still a good guy, joins us in the postgame for patrons. We're having some fun with our Season 7 finale before we take a break (at least from full episodes) for a couple weeks, and then we'll be back with some big format ...

Jacobin writer and editor Meagan Day joins us to talk about what reactionary "tradwife" influencers are latching onto, and how social democracy can actually help families in a way that ugly anti-feminist culture war can't. Before that, Ben does an Opening Argument on what the Epstein scandal says about our late capitalist hellscape. (No postgame tonight, sorry!) Read Ben's Epstein Files article: https://jacobin.com/2025/08/epstein-scandal-trump-clinton-bipartisanship Read Meagan's article ...

The crossover event the world has eagerly awaited is here (OK, well, some of us are excited)--Matt McManus and Stormin' Norman Finkelstein on the same podcast episode. As it turns out, they share an interest in John Stuart Mill, so we thought it might be interesting to explore that. Before that, Ben does an Opening Argument on Bret Stephens's absurd genocide denialism. Watch Norm deliver a lecture on Mill to the Communist Party of Great Britain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt3WmzLM5G0 ...

Nicholas Vrousalis, author of "Exploitation as Domination: What Makes Capitalism Unjust" joins Ben Burgis to talk about his book, how to rigorously think about capitalist exploitation, what it was like to work with G.A. Cohen in grad school, and more. Before that, Ben does an Opening Argument about the bizarro arguments of pro-Trump libertarians. In the postgame for patrons, Ryan Zickgraf joins us for a dramatic reading of Sophie Lewis's thoughts about the sex with octopuses. Order Nicholas'...

Steve Paxton studied with the great Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen as a graduate student at Oxford. Since then, he's had blue-collar jobs, white collar jobs, and been unemployed, but he's never stopped writing and thinking about socialism and Marxism. For this special Bastille Day episode, Ben Burgis talks with Steve about his book "How Capitalism Ends." Oh, and it's graphic designer Andy's birthday, so we'll raise a toast to our Bastille Day Boy. In the postgame for patrons, believe it or no...