Last Call with John Sweeney and Michael Weiss

John finally concedes that America is more fucked than the UK after seeing the QAnon wilderpeople invade both houses of Congress.

John and Michael on why, against all expectation, things just might be getting a bit better.

John and Michael talk to Doug London, the C.I.A.’s former chief for counterterrorism in south and southwest Asia, and a 34-year veteran of the Agency. Doug discusses the alleged GRU payments to the Taliban for killing American and British soldiers in Afghanistan, the way intelligence-gathering and classification works at the Agency, the Mueller Report, Russia's plans for the 2020 U.S. election, and much else.

John and Michael talk to two bestselling journalists, Luke Harding, author of Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia's Remaking of the West, and Catherine Belton, author of Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West. Go on, guess what they talked about.Also, pay to keep John and Michael in wine and gin by contributing to The Last Call's Patreon fund. Details here: https://t.co/Q4OSEfMFhP?amp=1

John and Michael talk to Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, the screenwriters and executive producers of the hit BBC mini-series The Salisbury Poisonings, about the GRU's attempted assassination of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and how that terrorist attack in Salisbury eerily prefigured our pandemic paranoia.

John and Michael discuss the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the U.S. and UK and why tearing down some statues is better than tearing down others.

John and Michael talk with former deputy Labour leader Tom Watson about English cheese (yes), life after politics and COVID, and everything that went wrong with Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, from the cranks to the Stalinists to the anti-Semites.

John and Michael talk to Peter Pomeranzev, author of This is Not Propaganda and Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, about how populists flourish in crisis and what the West learned from Vladimir Putin.

John and Michael discuss their plague reading and why homebodies like A.E. Housman will win the struggle for a post-pandemic imagination.