“Arrested in the Office of DEI” - On the New Racial Regime with Alana Lentin
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Release Date: 07/28/2025
Producers of Surplus Laborers, Never Citizens: Black Women's Reproduction and Capitalist Empire With T.D. Harper-Shipman
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this wide-ranging conversation, Takiyah (T.D.) Harper-Shipman joins us to discuss her new book (Stanford University Press, 2026). The discussion traces how modern states—from North Carolina to Senegal—have historically sutured Black women's fertility to the shifting demands of capitalist accumulation, deploying reproductive health policies not as benevolent care but as instruments of crisis management and labor control. Harper-Shipman unpacks the colonial origins of "womanhood" itself as a racialized labor category constructed during European enclosures, one that has always excluded...
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Mapping the ADL’s Origins in Settler-Colonial Liberalism, State Power, & Civil Rights as Cover with Emmaia Gelman
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we are joined by Emmaia Gelman, author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, a critical history of the ADL as a Cold War neoconservative institution. Gelman excavates the Anti-Defamation League's origins as a white, settler colonial institution founded by German-Jewish elites—not to combat antisemitism broadly, but to manage class respectability and suppress Eastern European Jewish immigrant socialists whom they viewed as a racial and social threat. Gelman looks back at how early Jewish settlers had built fortunes through participation in 19th-century US...
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The Camp David Republic: Egypt, Normalization, and the Long Defeat With Nihal El Aasar
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, Nihal El Aasar returns to this podcast to discuss the competing progressive alternatives in the Arab world prior to the establishment of the State of Israel. Arab attempts to join capitalist systems were obstructed by British and Zionist colonial power, leading to the maintenance of a hegemonic state. We also reference the Union of Arab States and the role of the Zionist entity in hindering regional development. Gamal Abdel Nasser and other leaders in Egypt attempted to create a sovereign economic and political space through nationalist projects. This was actively resisted by...
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The Financialization of the Culture industries & the False Promises of Spotify
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we are joined by Rob Arcand to discuss his work on Spotify, streaming, and the financialization of culture. We begin with Spotify’s emergence as a supposed democratizing force for working musicians, even as its model relied on surveillance and data-trawling. We explore how this data-driven promise — that listener analytics could be leveraged for touring and merch — reshaped the relationship between artists and audiences, often in ways that reinforced precarity rather than alleviated it. From there, we turn to Arcand’s comparison of Spotify’s ambitions to Uber and...
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Nothing is More Sacred than the Defense of Humanity: Gerald Perreira on Cuba, Iran, Liberation Theology, and the Caribbean
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we sit down with Gerald Perreira, longtime Guyanese anti-imperialist activist, educator, and organizer, for a conversation on Cuba, U.S. power, and the unfinished struggle for true independence in the Caribbean and broader Global South. We unpack the tightening of U.S. pressure on Cuba, including the attack on Cuban medical brigades across the region, and examine why Guyana’s recent political decisions represent a historic betrayal of transnational solidarity. From Cuba’s lifesaving medical internationalism and its decisive role in defeating apartheid forces in Angola and...
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The Revolt Eclipses Whatever The World Has to Offer with Idris Robinson
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we are joined by Idris Robinson to unpack his book, , a searing meditation on race, revolt, civil war, and the psychic wreckage of American life. Reflecting on the 2020 uprisings, Robinson challenges the myth of Black leadership, reframes racial violence through the lens of a “morbid libidinal economy,” and argues that revolution is as much a transformation of the human spirit as it is a political event. Drawing on the legacies of Black insurgency, Robinson interrogates liberalism, identity politics, and the hollowing out of American cities—while pondering on what it...
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The Long Transition to Socialism & Unequal Exchange with Torkil Lauesen
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, longtime revolutionary activist and author Torkil Lauesen returns to the show. Our conversation revolves around two of his recent works published by Iskra Books: and . Drawing on a lifetime of political engagement and his close relationship with theorist Arghiri Emmanuel, Lauesen discusses his motivation for writing these books as a means of passing down hard-won knowledge to a new generation of organizers. We examine the “long transition” from capitalism to socialism, a process Lauesen frames through the lens of historical materialism. He also explains how the transfer...
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Spring Surge to Melt ICE: Dare to Struggle on Building Organized Mass Resistance to Smash the Deportation Machine
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we are joined by organizers from Dare to Struggle, a multinational organization committed to struggling against all forms of domination. Throughout this conversation we discuss some of their tactics deployed in response to the recent uptick in ICE raids happening nationally. We take a critical look at what has been effective and what has not, and the stakes for those who are daring to struggle against the deportation machine are up against. We also discuss their recent calls for a Spring Surge to melt ice, please check out the show notes to see how you can connect and get...
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"Death Itself Is On Sale" - Ali Kadri on The Accumulation of Waste
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this conversation a group of us interviewed Dr. Ali Kadri about his book The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction. This conversation was the final discussion in a study group which began last October and involved participants from all over the world. The book provides a theoretical framework which understands waste as a value making process where war-making, the wasting of social classes, and the wasting of social nature become central to capitalist accumulation and to how capital resolves crises in accumulation. The questions in this discussion were those that...
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Queen Mother Audley Moore: Midwife of Black Revolutionary Nationalism with Dr. Ashley D Farmer
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Ashley Farmer to discuss the life and legacy of Queen Mother Audley Moore—an organizer, theorist, and political visionary who helped shape the very foundations of modern Black nationalism and the contemporary reparations movement. Though she was, as our guest writes, “one of the most important activists and theorists of the twentieth century,” Mother Moore’s figure has been largely confined to a handful of photographs and passing references, even as her ideas reverberate across generations. Dr. Farmer discusses how if Rosa Parks is remembered as...
info_outlineIn this conversation we’re exited to welcome Alana Lentin back to the show to talk about her new book The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy, which works with the concept of the racial regime put forth by Cedric Robinson in his book Forgeries of Memory and Meaning. The book features a foreword by Elizabeth Robinson, long time interlocutor, partner in critical media work, and life partner of Cedric Robinson.
We talk about this project which starts with an analysis of the war on so-called Critical Race Theory, and the attendant fascistic agenda, the “whitelash” against Black Studies, and gets deep into zionist counterinsurgency efforts throughout academia, as well as the so-called “war on antisemitism,” and how we make sense of “the processes through which racial colonial rule is ideologically resecured.”
It’s a really interesting read and I definitely recommend people pick it up.
Alana Lentin is a teacher and writer, and identifies as a Jewish European woman who is a settler on Gadigal-Wangal land (Sydney, Australia). Her work focuses on a critical theorization of race, racism and antiracism.
She is a Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University. She is the author and editor of multiple books, including Why Race Still Matters and Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe.
More about Dr. Lentin and her work can be found at her website.
This also is the first episode that Josh and Jared have recorded together since October of 2023, and it was great to collaborate again on an episode!
We hosted with the Sameer Project last week. With the forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, it is absolutely critical that we ways to continue getting support their way. We we’ll put a link to donate to the Sameer Project and to that conversation in the show description.
And of course if you appreciate the work that we do on audio podcasts like this, and through our video feed on Youtube, the best way to support our work is to become a patron show for as little as $1 a month, or support us through our BuyMeACoffee page.
Our music as always is courtesy of Televangel
Correction: in the interview Jared said it was the "National Federation of Teachers" which is not accurate (or a thing). It was the National Educators Association, however that vote from the a majority of the 7,000 delegates of the largest US teacher's union was rejected by the union's board. Read more here.
Now here is our conversation with Alana Lentin on The New Racial Regime
The title of the episode is a reference to this tweet.
Source of the image in the thumbnail.
Some References:
Dylan Rodríguez on Lexical Warfare & Counterinsurgency
"Stop Asian Hate" as Zionist Policing with Dylan Rodríguez
"Rosa Luxemburg and the Primitive Accumulation of Whiteness" by Siddhant Issar, Rachel H. Brown, and John McMahon
The War on Anti-Semitism with Anna-Esther Younes
Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, Decolonization & Islamophobia with Alana Lentin (MAKC episode)
Prior audio episodes with Alana Lentin