Sam hosts Jamelle Bouie, opinion columnist at the New York Times and co-host of the Unclear and Present Danger podcast, to wrap up the week in news! And in the second half, Sam is joined by Jamie Peck, in her triumphant return to MR (!) and Jorge Rocha, co-hosts of the Everybody Loves Communism podcast! Jamelle starts off with a dive into his new 90’s political-military thrillers podcast, before he and Sam get into the state of the Build Back Better bill, as it passes a House vote after a late night, in which Kevin McCarthy showed us why talking filibusters, while they force us to hear from some of the worst people, is drastically better than invoking cloture. Next, they get into the content of the bill, walking through the expansion in SALT deductions as an annoyingly large part of the $1.75 trillion package, as well as looking at the state of the Manchin and Sinema votes, and whether Democratic leadership successfully got rid of everything they didn’t want, and included everything they did want. They also discuss the impact the passing of the bill is already having on the approval of the Democrats (other than Biden), and what this means heading into a midterm in which the GOP, simply by nature of re-gerrymandering borders, have picked up at least five very necessary seats. They wrap up the interview by touching on Bouie’s recent piece for the NYT on structural racism, its relationship to capitalism’s reliance on inequality, and what it would mean for remnants of racism in a truly restructured and redistributed society. Then, Jamie and Jorge hop on to discuss a variety of important audio projects they’re working on, before getting into the state of the US’s Democratic Socialist movement, and why, in the wake of the incredible leftist and abolitionist organizing that we saw with the George Floyd uprisings and COVID pandemic, the DSA has an essential task of taking a look outside of explicitly electoral organizing. Sam also covers John Kennedy misunderstanding comrade as a term of endearment in his fear-mongering during Saule Omarova’s confirmation hearing.