Radical interviews from the exhausted edge.
This Is Hell! mixes chaotic booth chatter, listener favorites, and long-form interviews with a hard-left reading of power. Its episodes connect higher education labor, extraction, AI, war, austerity, and harm hidden by markets without sanding down the anger.
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This Is Hell! is a political interview program with a cracked-open radio-show surface and a very clear ideological spine. It starts loose. Music references, producer notes, local announcements, listener favorites, health updates, and self-mocking signoffs drift through the frame before the show tightens into arguments about capitalism, labor, war, and ecological damage. The result feels less like polished public-affairs programming than a long-running political room where the jokes, grudges, and research all know each other. Its interviews are the center. Recent episodes move from Loyola University Chicago faculty organizing to resource extraction and cancer in Kenya, from AI hype and data-center power to international law, Guantanamo, Ukraine, Gaza, plastics, fisheries, austerity, and the appetite for impunity. The show keeps returning to the same hard question: who pays for the comfort, convenience, security, and profit that powerful people describe as normal life? It is angry, but the anger has structure. Personal inconvenience becomes political critique; a business slogan becomes an argument about schools cutting humanities programs; a technology sales pitch becomes a story about planetary cost and human disposability. Guests are given space for dense, historical answers, and the host’s questions often arrive with the thesis already running. That can make the show feel crowded, but it is also what gives the conversations their charge. This Is Hell! is not trying to be a calm explainer for people who still need permission to care. It is for listeners already suspicious of official stories and hungry for sharper connections between local suffering and systems. The humor is dry. The worldview is bleak. The program still makes room for solidarity: faculty refusing picket lines, communities fighting plastics, writers returning to arguments the show has been making for years. Its best moments sound like political exhaustion refusing to become numb.
Made for: For listeners who want left political interviews with labor, war, environment, and market harm treated as connected problems. Best for people comfortable with blunt, irreverent framing and long historical arguments.
What sets it apart: Its edge comes from the collision of unruly radio texture and sustained ideological clarity. The show lets banter, annoyance, and doom stay in the room while still making space for serious guests and complex political history.
Manufacturing Dissent since 1996
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Long-form interviews connect political rhetoric to the institutional decisions and material harms that Chuck Mertz keeps firmly in view.
Chuck Mertz turns long-form interviews into pointed examinations of power, pairing an openly anti-capitalist perspective with questions that keep returning to institutions and their material consequences. This Is Hell!
Chuck Mertz makes capitalism defend itself, so your outrage arrives with footnotes.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A campus labor fight becomes a broader argument about what universities owe their people.
The episode puts the labor struggle at Loyola University Chicago front and center, using SEIU 73 Faculty Forward Union to widen the case against treating universities, government, and public life like businesses.
A loose but pointed conversation about Point Comfort, mercury, and a coastal economy being hollowed out by corporate delay.
The conversation moves from NWA, Ice Cube, and cassette nostalgia into a hard account of Point Comfort, where mercury, Superfund, and a landfill said to hold 100,000 pounds of mercury still shadow the town.
A replay that traces how one killing and the West's response reverberate across Venezuela, Sudan, and beyond.
The episode opens with a brief host update while Chuck is away for physical therapy, then turns back to a January 15 interview with Seamus Malika Fasali on his January Nation piece about the killing of Qasem Soleimani and its role in the brazen abduction of Nicolas Maduro.
Mattai argues that austerity makes people more dependent on markets and narrows political possibility.
Clara E. Mattai's argument puts capitalism's political machinery in plain view: austerity does more than trim public budgets; it weakens the conditions in which alternatives can take root.
A charged interview connects Trump's Iran rhetoric to the recycled logic of the Iraq war.
This Is Hell! sets Donald Trump's peacemaker pitch against a harsher record: military strikes across several countries, continued arming of the Israeli military during what the host calls genocide in Gaza, and disputed peace or ceasefire claims involving India, Pakistan, Israel,…
Overthinking, made oddly useful.
Feminist film criticism with bite.
Thoughtful conversations for photographers who look deeper.
China’s everyday debates, made conversational.
Bravo recaps with receipts and emotional memory.
Brian Mier says Flavio Bolsonaro is campaigning on pardoning Jair Bolsonaro, whom Mier describes as serving a 32-year sentence for an attempted coup.
This Is Hell!
This episode explores the ongoing impacts of colonialism in Kenya, linking resource extraction like oil to health issues such as cancer and questioning the hidden costs of consumption.
This episode critiques the misleading promises of artificial intelligence and examines how AI grifters wield political power alongside reactionary centrist Democrats.
This episode features an interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko discussing how the 2014 and 2004 Maidan revolutions in Ukraine failed due to class divisions, and how these events connect to the current war with Russia.
This episode discusses how AI technology is being used in ways that disregard human life, with a focus on the United States and Israel's non-recognition of international humanitarian laws.
The show opens with NWA and a cassette-memory joke.
Will fills in while Chuck is away for physical therapy.
The show opens with Will explaining that Chuck is away for physical therapy needs, so listener favorites and listener-suggested interviews are carrying the week.
Chuck Mertz opens with a gripe about background music, praising Jaco Pistorius's "Portrait of Tracy" while trying to place a song from a musical that keeps getting under his skin.
Brian Mier tells Chuck Mertz that after the January 3rd U.S.
This episode explores how capitalist systems contribute to the spread of vector-borne diseases like COVID-19 through environmental degradation and unsustainable consumption.
This episode discusses the concept of 'enshittification' with Cory Doctorow, exploring how digital platforms degrade over time through corporate exploitation and loss of user value.
This episode examines how Western ignorance and capitalist exploitation have historically plundered Africa, focusing on the psychological and economic mechanisms that enable this system.
This episode discusses an ongoing attempt to Christianize America by erasing the separation of church and state and instilling religious beliefs across all institutions.
This episode critiques how corporate science and neoliberal policies shift responsibility for health issues like obesity onto individuals, questioning the effectiveness of exercise and diet advice.