ICE, policing, and criminalization are treated as one system, not separate fights.
The episode treats ICE and policing as part of the same carceral logic, and it keeps circling back to how public safety language can turn into punishment.
Policy, survival, and the politics of care.
Death Panel treats policy as a question of life, power, and abandonment. Its interviews move from concrete harms to the larger structures behind them: prisons, IDs, courts, food systems, mutual aid, and care networks.
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Death Panel is a serious left political interview show about the institutions that organize survival. Its core subjects are disability, care, public policy, abolition, trans liberation, law, food systems, and the everyday forms of state control that often hide inside ordinary administration. The show does not treat policy as paperwork. It treats policy as a material force that sorts bodies, disciplines labor, limits movement, and decides who receives support. That gives even narrow topics a wide political charge. A conversation about gender markers on Kansas IDs becomes a history of state identification as administrative violence. A discussion of ICE and policing becomes an argument about criminalization as an expandable category, not a fixed boundary. An episode on mutual aid returns to the practical work of surviving together outside institutions that ration care. Interviews about self-provisioning cities, direct cash support, prison petitions, and prefigurative lawyering all circle the same question from different angles. What kinds of relationships make life possible when official systems fail, punish, or extract? The show’s style is measured and argument-forward. It tends to build a political frame before opening the conversation, giving guests room to complicate rather than simply react. Its language can move from concrete examples — courts, documents, gardens, food, cash, care — into broader concepts like carcerality, social reproduction, and administrative violence. The mood is grave, but not detached. Death Panel is animated by movements, not by think-tank neutrality. It is also unusually willing to interrogate reform language, especially when reform preserves the same underlying logic in softer terms. The best episodes feel less like commentary on the week than a sustained attempt to name the structure beneath the event. It is demanding in the best sense. The show assumes listeners can follow complexity and rewards that attention with arguments that connect everyday harms to long histories of power.
Made for: For listeners drawn to left politics, disability justice, abolition, trans liberation, and public policy as lived material struggle. It suits people who prefer long, serious interviews over fast news takes.
What sets it apart: Death Panel turns specific institutions and documents into evidence of larger political systems. Its strength is the way it connects care, punishment, identity, law, and survival without flattening them into a single slogan.
Politics, culture, and public policy from the left. Stay alive another week.w/ Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco and Jules Gill-Peterson. https://www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Death Panel follows policy into the institutions, enforcement systems and organizing practices through which political power becomes tangible.
Death Panel turns interviews into close examinations of how public power reaches ordinary life. Beatrice Adler-Bolton guides conversations with organizers, writers, researchers and law scholars, moving from immigration enforcement and policing to disability rights, state…
Death Panel tracks the path from Supreme Court doctrine to the gender marker on your ID.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
ICE, policing, and criminalization are treated as one system, not separate fights.
The episode treats ICE and policing as part of the same carceral logic, and it keeps circling back to how public safety language can turn into punishment.
A forceful argument about IDs, gender, and what state paperwork is for.
Kansas' fight over gender markers on IDs opens into a bigger question about what state paperwork is for, and who it is meant to serve. Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Cassius Adair move from the immediate policy fight into a longer history of state paperwork, including the reminder…
A sharp account of how idealized body standards can become instruments of political discipline.
Death Panel's conversation with Daeshawn Harrison treats body standards as a political program, not just a cultural fixation. Harrison traces the demand for an idealized body into the language of health, linking it to post-COVID racism, the pre-normalization of triage and…
A Minneapolis-centered conversation about abolitionist groundwork, school safety, and ICE resistance.
Death Panel sets Minneapolis's 2020 uprising beside ICE resistance, with Anne Kossoff-Jones and Jonathan Stegall's Truthout article anchoring the discussion.
Disability cases become a route into the conservative legal theory reshaping who can sue states and where rights claims can be heard.
Disability civil rights cases become a revealing way into the broader story of how the contemporary conservative legal project gained traction.
A grounded look at how repeated eSIM work turns distance into practical care.
Crips for eSIMs for Gaza stays with the plain mechanics of the project: spreadsheets, phone settings, eSIM boxes, top-ups, and the next attempt when a connection fails.
Careful conversations from Canadian movements.

Moral questions with consequences for minds, machines, and power.

WSJ reporters unpack the Epstein files, surrogacy industry abuses, and true-crime court battles.


Dan Carlin's solo essays connecting executive power, historical collapse, and American democracy.

Law scholars Karen Tani and Katie Eyer discuss their Yale Law Journal article on how disability civil rights cases in the 1970s-90s became building blocks for the conservative 'new federalism' revolution.
Crips for E-Sims for Gaza centers on repeated acts of eSIM support.
This episode discusses fighting for healthcare under oppressive systems like health fascism and capitalism, framed within a socialist conference setting with COVID safety protocols.
This episode examines how famine is used as a tool of genocide in Gaza, critiquing media efforts to downplay or deny the evidence of starvation against Palestinians.
This episode features a conversation with Rasha Abdulhadi about taking bold actions in solidarity with Palestine, recorded live at the Socialism Conference.
This episode features an interview with Kelly Hayes about her upcoming edited book 'Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis', discussing its role as a care package for organizers in difficult times.
Artie Vierkant, filling in solo for Beatrice, argues that AI data centers are "indifference engines" and a vector of what Friedrich Engels called social murder.
This episode features historian Kate Brown discussing her book 'Tiny Gardens Everywhere' and exploring how self-provisioning practices in urban spaces reveal crucial insights about power, survival, and social reproduction.
This episode features an interview with disabled writers and organizers Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Jane Shi discussing their project Crips for eSims for Gaza, focusing on disability justice and digital access in solidarity with Palestine.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton interviews returning guest Dean Spade about the updated second edition of his book 'Mutual Aid' and discusses collective survival and care practices.
This episode features an interview with Natalie Rupp, executive director of the Trans Income Project, discussing their work providing direct cash support and comprehensive care to transgender communities in New Orleans through mutual aid networks.
This teaser episode discusses critiques of labor, racial capitalism, and the prison system embedded in historical letters, focusing on how disability and unproductivity are strategically leveraged, with examples like Mary Alexander's 1923 petition.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton opens by linking ICE and police as part of the same carceral logic.
Kansas is the immediate point of entry.
Da'Shaun L. Harrison says body fascism starts with the state making one ideal body seem natural.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Anne Kossoff-Jones and Jonathan Stegall about Minneapolis's 2020 uprising and the abolitionist groundwork for ICE resistance.