Watching a Live Taping of the Prison-Themed Podcast Ear Hustle in Donald Trump's America Was an Emotional and Bittersweet Experience

A month or so ago, my wife and I attended a live taping of Ear Hustle, an NPR show she has been listening to for years, dedicated to a proposition that once seemed undeniable but now seems radical. As someone who spends a lot of time in her car, I’ve also been listening to the podcast for at least a few years. 

Ear Hustle believes passionately that people in prison are human beings with dignity whose voices deserve to be heard and whose stories are worth telling with humor, empathy, and compassion. 

It would be easy for a radio show about life in prison to be unbearably sad and unrelentingly depressing. That is particularly true now, when the powerful are taking great delight in hurting the powerless and vulnerable in ways that will take generations to recover from. 

That’s why Ear Hustle’s sense of the absurdity is so essential. It leavens the heaviness of the subject matter and allows us to appreciate the absurdity, ridiculousness, and surreality of life behind bars. 

The prison-industrial system takes away the humanity of the incarcerated. It replaces their names with numbers. Ear Hustle gives them their humanity and their names back. It empowers the powerless to tell their stories for an empathetic and understanding audience. 

Ear Hustle was created by Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, African American men who were in prison when the show began, and artist, photographer, and professor Nigel Poor. 

Poor looked exactly how I thought she would based on her voice and her story: like a quintessential NPR do-gooder with a soothing voice that makes the world seem just a little bit kinder. 

In co-creating and co-hosting Ear Hustle, Poor has done tremendous good. She’s the ally we well-meaning progressives all aspire to be.

There was something particularly poignant about watching Ear Hustle live at a time when the government is doing everything in its power to ensure that the voices of the vulnerable and oppressed are silenced. 

Every day, the Trump administration finds new and alarming ways to drive home that the lives of the underclass do not matter. The goal of the prison system is to rehabilitate as well as punish. 

The MAGA movement does not believe that prisoners can be rehabilitated unless they did something noble and patriotic, like attacking police officers during the January 6th insurrection. 

The warm humanity of Ear Hustle stands in stark contrast to the performative cruelty of a Trump administration that seems to feel strongly that we don’t imprison enough people and that our prisons are insufficiently cruel. 

The MAGA crowd seems to think that, like every institution in American society, including the military and professional sports, prisons have become too woke. 

Under Trump’s leadership, the government has withdrawn from its role in helping people and recommitted itself to harming the American people. 

Trump doesn't want to help the suffering; he wants to hurt them. He wants to make them disappear. He doesn't want them to remind "real" Americans (white, wealthy Trump voters) that horrific inequality exists.

It’s not enough to imprison more people than any other country, both in terms of percentages and absolute numbers. It's similarly insufficient to pass draconian, racist laws to fill for-profit prisons that allow the rich to get even richer. 

We now take great pride in shipping people of color, who we’re assured must be guilty of something, to prisons in other countries notorious for their brutality, without bothering with niceties like due process.

Kristen Noem has made Donald Trump’s dream of brown people with the evil audacity to want to live in the United States without going through the official process disappear in shadowy prison systems even more sadistic than our own. 

Watching Ear Hustle humanize prisoners, I couldn’t help but think of the performative cruelty of Kristi Noem, a proud puppy-killer, doing photo ops in foreign prisons with men stripped down to their underwear to highlight both the dehumanizing nature of justice, Trump-style, and the scary tattoos ostensibly betraying their membership in notorious gangs. 

Trump didn’t turn us into sadists and bigots. Instead, he tapped into a deep vein of sadism and bigotry coursing through American society. 

The Ear Hustle taping felt like an echo of a kinder, more decent past. It represented the original meaning of Woke, before conservatives cynically transformed it into a catch-all term for anything that they don’t like involving unforgivable non-male non-whiteness.

Woke used to mean acknowledging the reality of institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and taking conscious steps to address them. Woke used to mean being socially conscious and having compassion for people very different from you. It used to mean looking at prisoners as people with families and histories, and stories that are funny, sweet, and inspirational, as well as sad and painful.

I fear for the future of Ear Hustle because a man famous for talking about how his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein loves the ladies and he likes 'em young, and advocating for grabbing attractive women by the genitalia as a greeting, decided that Big Bird and Mr. Rogers had been teaching anti-American values and PBS must be stopped before they spread even more pro-kindness propaganda. 

I was transported back in time to a glorious era when acknowledging and working to address inequality was seen as inherently wrong and a much greater transgression than aggressively promoting and justifying inequality. 

Watching Ear Hustle live was a profoundly bittersweet experience that made the world seem simultaneously kinder and crueler. 

We need Ear Hustle. We need more shows like it. Hopefully, it will survive this awful cultural moment and continue to remind us of all that we have in common with a segment of the population that we’ve been encouraged to see as a cultural scourge and not fellow human beings whose lives have value and meaning not because of what they can do for us but rather because all lives have value and meaning.