Novara Media

Downstream: Venezuela, China and the End of the Dollar w/ Glenn Greenwald

It has been a bellicose start to 2026, with the US army kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and threatening to annex Greenland, putting many more nations, including Mexico and Colombia, on high alert. On Downstream this week is investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who’s best known for helping Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the NSA’s global surveillance program come to light, as well as investigations that led to Brazilian president Lula’s release from prison. He sat down in his Rio De Janeiro studio to speak to Aaron Bastani about the differences in Trump 2.0’s foreign policy, how the last year has seen unprecedented corporate consolidation of media and whether the US empire is flexing a novel expansionist ambition or if the lashing out of the last week is a sign of decline.

Downstream: Exposing the Israeli Capture of British Politics w/ Peter Oborne

After ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ on October 7th, a specific narrative quickly emerged and pervaded the entire Western mainstream media. Namely, that unprecedented horrors were committed against the state of Israel and that whatever way it responded was justified. Any deviation from this narrative was quickly shut down. In the intervening years, the British state has aided Israel in its response, a response that organisations including Amnesty & B’tselem have called a genocide in Gaza. Peter Oborne is a journalist and author whose new book, ‘Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza [https://orbooks.com/catalog/complicit/]’, provides a forensic account and set of references defying anyone denying Britain’s fuelling of genocide in Gaza.

Downstream: 2025: What Actually Happened? w/ Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani

Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani joined each other on 17th December for a special end-of-year Downstream, wrapping up the year in politics.

Downstream: ‘Gaza Is Over, It’s Gone. There’s Nothing Left’ w/ Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein is one of the west’s leading anti-Zionist scholars. The son of Holocaust survivors, he has spent his life studying and critiquing Israel’s assault on Palestine, decades before it became socially acceptable to do so. Yet despite having dedicated his career to it, by the day before Hamas’ attack in October 2023, Norman had all but given up on the cause of Palestinian liberation. His most recent book on the subject had sold 370 copies. When news of the attack arrived, Norman knew people would want to hear from him. He wrestled with what to say, eventually coming to the view that Hamas’ actions could be viewed through the lens of the slave rebellions in the early 1800s: heinous acts of violence borne out of desperate circumstances: acts that he could not condemn. In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Norman tells the story of his parents’ lives before the war, and the life they built in the shadow of the Holocaust. Could they speak about what they had been through? How did their experience impact Norman’s work and his devotion to the truth? What was it like arguing with his mentor, Noam Chomsky? And what is Israel’s endgame?

ACFM Microdose: The ‘Radical Realists’ of Mainstream, Labour’s New Faction

After a Trip episode about the meaning of mainstream, this time the gang go deeper into ‘Mainstream’ – that is, the new soft-left faction inside Labour. Yes, a festive episode about the inner workings of a political party! Don’t say we don’t spoil you. Jem, Nadia and Keir explain the emergence of Mainstream’s ‘radical realists’ – who include Andy Burnham and Clive Lewis – by exploring the lesser-known history of political tendencies that have shaped and split the Labour Party since the second world war. Further reading: Jem’s recent piece in Tribune [https://tribunemag.co.uk/2025/11/reclaiming-labour/]. Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novaramedia.com/support