Welcome to this Forthright Radio for October 9, 2026. Returning once again to Forthright Radio is University of Southern California Professor of Literature, David Treuer. He was our guest in 2019, when his book, THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE: NATIVE AMERICA FROM 1890 TO THE PRESENT, was published. His latest book, THE SAVAGE MIND: AN AMERICAN LEGACY, was in October by Little, Brown and Company.
It’s part memoir, and part seering history and analysis. When I first typed that, I “misspelled” searing, meaning severe criticism, marked by extreme intensity, harshness or emotional power; as “seering”, which autocorrect auto-corrected, but I self-corrected auto-correct right back to my original spelling, because in his book, he is a seer, both in the sense of “one who sees,” and “a person credited with extraordinary moral and spiritual insight.”
In THE SAVAGE MIND, David recounts growing up on the Leech Lake Ojibwe Indian Reservation. His mother, Margaret Seelye Treuer, was Minnesota’s first female Native American attorney in 1977, as well as tribal court and federal magistrate judge. His father, Robert Treuer, was an Austrian, Jewish Holocaust refugee, reservation high school teacher, and life long social justice worker both within, the federal government and without.
David left the reservation as soon as he could to attend Princeton University, where he developed an obsession with the art and discipline of fencing, pursued a degree in Anthropology, and then added a focus on Literature. His thesis advisor was Nobel Laureate,Toni Morrison. When she and David’s mother met, his mother thanked Morrison for teaching her son, who replied, “you’re welcome. It wasn’t easy.”
We spoke with David Treuer on October 2, 2026 via Zoom.
Image Credit of David Treuer above: Jaida Grey Eagle
As issues continue to arise about the upcoming midterm elections, we invited the CEO of The League of Women Voters, Celina Stewart, to discuss their work. For over a century, they continue to rise to the challenge of protecting our right to vote.
Celina Stewart is a nationally recognized voting rights attorney, and champion of American democracy. Appointed CEO just three months before the 2024 presidential election, she guided The League of Women Voters through one of the most consequential election cycles in modern history, reaching more than 30 million voters and investing over $1 million in nonpartisan election education in her first year of leadership. She oversees The League’s operations, resources and strategies across a national network of more than 750 affiliates. We spoke with her on September 8, 2026 via Zoom.
Then, as we observe the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, we hear Wendell Berry, who recently died at the age of 92, read from his story, Making It Home.
“The Congressional elections are at hand. They occur in the most critical period our country has ever faced or is likely to face in our time. If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you will express yourself unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives. I am your servant and will accept your judgment without cavil, but my power to administer the great trust assigned me by the Constitution would be seriously impaired should your judgment be adverse, and I must frankly tell you so because so many critical issues depend upon your verdict.” -Woodrow Wilson, 1918
From Heather Cox Richards’ Letter from an American 9-3-26 https://substack.com/home/post/p-213960738“ in Tarrant County, Texas, county commissioners tried an even cruder way of rigging the election. As Cecelia Lenzen of the Texas Tribune reported, they voted 3–2 along party lines to get rid of 92 of the polling sites the county had in 2022 before the midterm election. In 2022 there were 316 election sites; the Republican commissioners cut that number to 224. They also cut three sites for early voting, from 50 to 47. Republicans voted for the cuts; Democrats voted against them. “It’s not about cost. This is about power. This is very political. This is campaigning from the dais,” said Democrat Alisa Simmons. Throughout the eight-hour meeting about the cuts, speakers from the audience called on the commissioners to increase, rather than decrease, the number of voting sites for the more than 1.3 million people registered to vote in Tarrant County. Those 1.3 million people are more than live in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, or Montana, and about the same number of people who live in Maine or New Hampshire. FACT CHECKED: From the Tarrant County Registrar of Voters office: 1,329,559 registered voters – 81.27% of eligible population 18+ years old
Links to articles and videos pertinent to this show:
Our guest today on Forthright Radio is writer, analyst and investigative journalist, Casey Michel. He is Director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, where he works on topics ranging from kleptocracy, oligarchy, illicit finance and dark money, as well as foreign lobbying and foreign interference. In addition, he is also a Senior Non-Resident Fellow with the Center for International Policy.
Among his books are FOREIGN AGENTS: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World; AMERICAN KLEPTOCRACY: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History; and his most recent book is , United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally With Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy, published earlier this month by St. Martin’s Press.
We spoke with Casey Michel on August 24, 2026 via Zoom.
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official… It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.” –Theodore Roosevelt
“We have, therefore, reached the point as a nation where we must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself. We must find a way to take an appeal from the Supreme Court to the Constitution itself. We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution and not over it. In our courts we want a government of laws and not of men. I want – as all Americans want – an independent judiciary as proposed by the framers of the Constitution. That means a Supreme Court that will enforce the Constitution as written, that will refuse to amend the Constitution by the arbitrary exercise of judicial power – in other words by judicial say-so. It does not mean a judiciary so independent that it can deny the existence of facts which are universally recognized.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937
Articles, etc. pertinent to our interview with Casey Michel:
It seems healthcare – or the lack of it – is a hot topic these days. Whether it’s candidates advocating for single payer health care, and winning primary elections, or political appointees in The Department of Health and Human Services forcing out tens of thousands of agency employees; firing or replacing top leadership across the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; dismantling or heavily altering over a quarter of the scientific and public health advisory panels; cancelling billions of dollars of research grants, or funds to local health departments for tracking communicable diseases, mental health or addiction – with rapid spread of outbreaks such as measles, cyclospora or salmonella. One could go on and on in this vein.
Instead, I am delighted to share a conversation with retired physician, Dr. David King. For almost four decades he was a general practitioner in the small town of Belgrade, MT, which shares similarities with our Mendocino County communities – his patients were loggers, farmers and ranchers, small business owners and employees and families. His wife of many years, Daralee Schroeder, was a crew boss at the Plum Creek Lumber Mill.
He created numerous clinics, has been the medical director for nursing homes, hospice care, the geriatric team for the local hospital. Since retiring, he has been advocating for universal healthcare in the United States, He “says: We don’t have a health care system, We have a “health insurance system.”
We spoke with Dr. David King on August 10, 2026 via Zoom.
Some of the slides Dr. King mentioned in this conversation:
The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) Single Payer Cost Estimates
Cal Flyn is an award winning writer from the highlands of Scotland. In 2022, she was named a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. She has been the winner of the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the John Burroughs Medal, and she was a finalist for the Wainwright Prize, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
Her first book, Thicker Than Water, which explored questions of colonialism and intergenerational guilt, was a Times book of the year. Her second book, Islands of Abandonment, was about the ecology and psychology of abandoned places. Her most recent book, THE SAVAGE LANDSCAPE: HOW WE MADE THE WILDERNESS, will be published by Viking on July 28, 2026.
She is the current Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University, deputy editor of the literary recommendations site Five Books, and has written for publications including The Guardian, Granta, National Geographic, and The Wall Street Journal.
Pepper Culpepper is Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy, and Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at the Blavatnik School of Government, and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. His research explores the intersection of capitalism and democracy.
His recent book, co-written with Harvard Professor Taeku Lee, BILLIONAIRE BACKLASH: THE AGE OF CORPORATE SCANDAL AND HOW IT COULD SAVE DEMOCRACY, argues for the positive, and politically popular, role of government regulatory action against large corporations in an era of populism. The work builds on some of the scholarly insights from his five-year Advanced Grant Project funded by the European Research Council, which sought to understand how big banks and the rules that govern them became objects of political contestation after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.
His earlier books include the award winning, Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan; and Creating Cooperation. His public commentary has appeared in the Conversation, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, The New Republic, Times Higher Education, and The Washington Post.
We spoke with Pepper Culpepper on July 7, 2026 via Zoom.
What if your spouse has severe food allergies? You planned your trip to Disney World to find restaurants that prioritize patrons with such allergies. You asked your waiter several times, if your meal could be prepared without your allergens. Your waiter reassured you each time that it would be. When your food arrived without the labels marking them as safe, you expressed concern and the waiter again tells you that it is fine to eat. So you enjoy your meal. An hour later, your spouse drops to the ground struggling to breathe, and dies. You sue Disney and the company that owns the restaurant for negligence. Disney immediately moves to remove your suit from open court, to the shadows of forced arbitration, a private system of so-called justice that favors corporate defendants. Because you had signed up for the Disney + streaming service 4 years before, and had bought tickets to Disney World, and one of Disney’s lawyers was a former justice of the Florida Supreme Court, Disney had the law on its side.
This is just one scenario our guest, Brendan Ballou, cites in his latest book, WHEN COMPANIES RUN THE COURTS: HOW FORCED ARBITRATION BECAME AMERICA’S SECRET JUSTICE SYSTEM, published by Public Affairs. Perhaps you recall our 2023 interview with Brendan Ballou, when his earlier book, PLUNDER: PRIVATE EQUITY’S PLAN TO PILLAGE AMERICA, came out. https://forthright.media/2023/06/06/brendan-ballou-plunder-private-equitys-plan-to-pillage-america/
He served in the Department of Justice in the first Trump administration, and resigned because of Trump’s immigration bans. In the Biden administration, he was a Special Counsel for private equity at the DOJ’s Anti-trust Division, from 2020 – 2025. As a federal prosecutor, he prosecuted rioters, who had attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He also served in the National Security Division of the DOJ. So, he has a thorough knowledge of justice and injustice; how we got to this point; and what can be done.
We spoke with Brendan Ballou on June 22, 2026 via Zoom.
We end this edition of Forthright Radio with an analysis of the appeals prospects for the Texas anti-ICE Prairieland protestors, who were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison.
“A new administration must screen out those who regard Government service as the door to power or wealth, those who cannot distinguish between private gains and public trust, and those who believe that old-fashioned honesty with the public’s money is both old and out of fashion.” John F. Kennedy, 1960
Returning to be our guest again is internationally renowned public intellectual, writer, and cultural and political critic, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, & The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy – Professor Henry Giroux.
He has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited academics working in any area of Humanities research. His books have been translated into many languages.
Henery Giroux is on the editorial and advisory boards of numerous national and international scholarly journals, and he co-edited a series on education and cultural studies with Paulo Freire for a decade. He is on the Board of Directors for Truthout. He is interviewed regularly on a number of different media including Democracy Now! Despite these illustrious credentials, he is never dull in conversation, and he certainly isn’t in this one, which was recorded via Zoom on June 5, 2026.
Liz Helenchild from the 2018 Mendocino Poetry Celebration Photo by Dan Roberts
This edition of Forthright Radio ends with a poem by Mendocino poet and radio colleague, Liz Helenchild‘s, poem: SLICE. Thanks to Dan Roberts for broadcasting it on Rhythm Running River (6-7-26) and for permission to include it. It was recorded at the 2026 Mendocino Poetry Celebration.
Gal Beckerman is an author and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book is HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT. Before coming over to The Atlantic, whose books section he also ran, he was an editor at the New York Times Book Review for six years. He also served as the opinion editor at the Forward newspaper and a staff editor and writer at the Columbia Journalism Review. His writing has appeared in a number of places over the years, including the Washington Post, The New Republic and Bookforum.
His previous books include The Quiet Before, which was a New York Times Notable pick in 2022, and When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone, which won two major book awards and was chosen as a book of the year by The New Yorker and the Washington Post.
Over the years he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, lived in Berlin as a German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and broke his arm almost in half while biking across France.
Our guest today is Amherst College’s Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Lawrence Douglas. He is the author of seven books, including the nonfiction books, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust; and Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020; as well as the novels, The Catastrophist, and The Vices.
The recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and American Academy in Berlin, and the Carnegie Foundation, he has lectured throughout the United States and in more than a dozen countries, and has served as visiting professor at the University of London and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
His latest book, THE CRIMINAL STATE: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice, was just published by Princeton University Press. It’s a re-interpretation of international law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—and leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights. It’s a provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice, which is certainly relevant to the current conflicts around the world and, sadly, increasingly here at home, as well.
