Paul Pierson is the UC Berkeley John Gross Endowed Chair of Political Science. He was our guest in 2022 to comment on the midterm election and in 2020 when his book, co-authored with Jacob Hacker, LET THEM EAT TWEETS: HOW THE RIGHT RULES IN AN AGE OF EXTREME INEQUALITY, was published. They also collaborated on the books, WINNER TAKE ALL POLITICS; and AMERICAN AMNESIA: HOW THE WAR ON GOVERNMENT LED US TO FORGET WHAT MADE AMERICA PROSPER.
We were curious to learn what he was thinking of the first 90 days of the second Trump administration. We spoke with him first via Skype on April 21st, and when Skype refused to function half way through, he graciously agreed to another interview via FaceTime on April 22nd.
Susanne Mueller Redwood is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Montana State University. Her research focuses on the international dimensions of authoritarianism. She investigates the role that economic cooperation plays in the survival and breakdown of authoritarian regimes. Her work has analyzed the role of trade, central banking, and currency politics under dictatorship, and has been published in different outlets, including the Review of International Political Economy and Cambridge University Press.
The broadcast of this Forthright Radio program ended with an interview by The Kyiv Independent’s Chris York with U.S. historian and author, Marci Shore, who had announced that she — along with her husband, historian Timothy Snyder, and colleague Jason Stanley — would be leaving their posts at Yale University and moving to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto. It ended with John Lithgow‘s reading of Timothy Snyder‘s 20 Lessons on Tyranny. Due to copyright issues, we do not include them in this recording, however they can be accessed here:
Returning in our first segment, is Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in critical pedagogy and Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University, Henry Giroux.
In our second segment is Michael Klare, who is a Five Colleges professor emeritus of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College. He is currently the secretary for the Arms Control Association board of directors, and a senior visiting fellow working on emerging technologies—such as lethal autonomous weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles—and how arms control strategies can mitigate their adverse impacts.
We spoke with Henry Giroux on March 24, 2025 from his home in Hamilton, Ontario, and Michael Klare on March 25th from his in Washington, D.C. Our conversation with Michael Klare begins at 25:05.
What a week! When we interviewed Michael Klare, the news of the Signal Group Chat had just broken. Since then, more has come to light. We were able to report that against the wishes of the government of Greenland, Usha Vance, Michael Waltz (he of the inclusion of the Atlantic’s Editor in Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the infamous group chat) and Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, would be coming, whether Greenland wanted them to or not. Then, Vice President JD Vance announced he didn’t want “Usha to have all the fun,” so he would be coming, too. Then, the Prime Minister of Denmark condemned Trump’s escalated rhetoric. Now, The visit by the Americans is to be limited to the US Military Base in Northern Greenland. That’s as of the afternoon of March 27th. Who knows what will have happened by airtime on March 28th? Word has it that Greenlanders have created red MAGA caps – Make America Go Away.
We ended the program with the news from the talented Marsh Family, who turn current events into parodic art. They are a British mom, dad, 2 brothers and 2 sisters. We shared “You Were Not Supposed to Message It Through”and “I Put Up Tariffs.” Although we were not able to include them in the audio, due to copyright/royalty issues, the links to them are included below.
Articles and videos pertinent to this edition of Forthright Radio:
This edition of Forthright Radio is in two segments. In the first part, award-winning author, Lydia Reeder, discusses her latest book, THE CURE FOR WOMEN: DR. MARY PUTNAM JACOBI AND THE CHALLENGE TO VICTORIAN MEDICINE THAT CHANGED WOMEN’S LIVES FOREVER, published by St. Martin’s Press. It explores the pseudoscience that ties women’s health issues to their reproductive biology, and highlights the women doctors, scientists and suffragists, particularly Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, who fought back against these attempts to control women’s bodies and lives. At the end of her book, she quotes Ely Van De Warker, who wrote, “A woman’s ovaries belong to the Commonwealth; she is merely their custodian.”
We spoke with Lydia Reeder via Skype on March 7th, 2025.
Mary Putnam Kennedy
Then, in our second segment, we speak with Pagan Kennedy about her latest book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RAPE KIT: A TRUE CRIME STORY. Our interview with Pagan begins at 25:50.
Dana Frank, Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a longtime historian of labor, women, and social movements in the US and beyond. For many years she has worked on human rights and US policy in Honduras. She has been an expert witness testifying in the US Congress, The House of Commons in The Canadian Parliament, as well as the CA Legislature.
Among her seven books are Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism; The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup; and, with Robin D.G. Kelly and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century.
Her work has been published in diverse outlets ranging from the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, to Labor Notes, The Nation, The Baffler, The Jacobin, The Progressive, to Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, to mention just a few, as well as in many scholarly publications.
Her latest book is WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION? STORIES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE & COLLECTIVE ACTION IN HARD TIMES, published by Beacon Press.
We spoke with her on February 24, 2025, the third anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, via Skype from her home in Santa Cruz, CA.
Cory Doctorow is a multiple awards winning author, blogger, critic and activist. He has co-founded an open software company, been the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he helped establish their Open Rights Group. When he left the blog site, Boing Boing after 19 years of co-ownership, MetaFilter called it “the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up for the blog world.” He metablogs currently at pluralistic.net. Cory Doctorow popularized the term “metacrap” and created the neologism, “enshitification,” which the FCC does not allow us to use on the air, which we replaced with “enpoopification,” defined as “the process of degradation of an online environment caused by greed.” He is a prolific author in many genres, fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction books include: THE INTERNET CON: HOW TO SEIZE THE MEANS OF COMPUTATON; CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM: HOW BIG TECH AND BIG CONTENT CAPTURED CREATIVE LABOR MARKETS AND HOW WE’LL WIN THEM BACK (written with Rebecca Giblin); and HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM.
His most recent fiction books include THE LOST CAUSE, A NOVEL OF TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN OUR POLARIZED FUTURE, which has been described as “A solarpunk, hopepunk novel of the climate emergency, endorsed by Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit and Kim Stanley Robinson.” The first of his Martin Hench books, RED TEAM BLUES, which actually features Mendocino County in a small but crucial role, was published in 2023. This was followed by Bezzle, and the third book, which will be published on February 18, 2025, PICKS AND SHOVELS. We spoke with him about it via Skype on February 11, 2025.
Wired Portrait of Cody Doctorow above by Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (JUCO) 5
It was really difficult to schedule an interview with our guest today, Dr. Lerone A. Martin, PhD. We emailed back and forth more times than I care to mention, but when we were finally able to find a time which each of our calendars made possible, it was one of those moments when one says to oneself, “well of course that’s when it needed to be!” …. January 20, 2025, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump.
You see, Dr. Martin is the faculty director for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, where he is also an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies. His books and scholarship provide critical context for the forces of religion, politics, and race that have shaped the contemporary American political and social landscape.
His appointment to the position of Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor was the result of a national search to succeed the storied King Institute’s founding director after more than 40 years in the role, making Dr. Martin only the second faculty director. Among his responsibilities as the MLK Institute’s director is the ongoing work of editing Dr. King’s significant sermons, speeches, published writings, correspondence and unpublished papers.
It was while researching his award winning first book, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion, that his second book had its roots: THE GOSPEL OF J. EDGAR HOOVER: HOW THE FBI AIDED AND ABETTED THE RISE OF WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM. We spoke with him via Skype.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about ecologist and one time presidential candidate, Barry Commoner, and his Four Laws of Ecology, which he enumerated in his 1971 book, THE CLOSING CIRCLE. They are:
Everything is connected to everything else. There is only one Ecosphere for all living organisms, and what affects one affects all.
Everything must go somewhere. There is no “waste” in Nature, and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.
Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon Nature, but such change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of Nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.
Our guest on this edition of Forthright Radio, award winning author and journalist, Vince Beiser, begins his latest book, POWER METAL: THE RACE FOR THE RESOURCES THAT WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE, with the statement, “There is no such thing as clean energy,” so I thought it would be good to find out more about his reporting from “over 100 countries, states, provinces, kingdoms, occupied territories, no man’s lands and disaster zones. He has exposed conditions in California’s harshest prisons, trained with US Army soldiers, ridden with the first responders to natural disasters, and hunted down other stories from around the world.”
His earlier book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, was a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. As well as A California Book Award. He has written for the Oakland Tribune, The LA Times, Village Voice, The Nation and Rolling Stone, as well as being the former senior editor of Mother Jones. We spoke with Vince Beiser from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, via Skype.
POWER METAL: THE RACE FOR THE RESOURCES THAT WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE is published by Riverhead Books. Vince Beiser also writes on Substack, which you can access here: https://powermetal.substack.com
Due to time limitations, we were not able to discuss his chapter, “New Lives for Old Things,” on the Right to Repair movement. In it he writes about a couple of Cal Poly Tech students, who became so incensed at products designed to preclude owners from repairing them that they created a website iFixit, which hosts a free online repository of more than 103,000 do it yourself repair manuals for some 54,000 separate products. Here is a link: https://www.ifixit.com/
During the broadcast, I referred to the recent 5-2 Montana Supreme Court opinion, which upheld a permit the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation issued to Tintina Montana Incorporated (now Sandfire Resources) to manipulate approximately 250 millions gallons of groundwater in pursuit of a 14 million-ton copper deposit in Meagher County, and which environmentalists fear will endanger the pristine Smith River. I misspoke, mentioning the transnational Rio Tinto mining company instead of Tintina Montana Incorporated.
On December 18, 2024 in a 6-1 ruling, The Montana Supreme Court upheld District Court Judge Kathy Seeley’s verdict in favor of the 16 Youth Plaintiffs in the Held v State of Montana case. They had sued the state for violations of their rights to a clean and healthful environment under the Montana State Constitution.
Melissa Hornbein Western Environmental Law Center
After the ruling, I invited Western Environmental Law Center attorney, Melissa Hornbein, a member of the plaintiffs’ legal team, and Anne Hedges of the Montana Environmental Information Center, whose lawsuits over the decades were cited by Chief Justice Mike McGrath’s opinion, and who had been an expert witness during the trail.
Anne Hedges Montana Environmental Information Center
Below are links to our coverage during the June 2023 trial, as well as other articles, etc. pertinent to the case and our interview.
Dr. Timothy W. Ryback, PhD is an historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He previously served as the Deputy-Secretary General of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris, and Director and Vice President of the Salzburg Global Seminar.
Timothy Ryback has written on European history, politics and culture for numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal.
He is the author of numerous books, including Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, which has appeared in more than 25 editions around the world; his book, The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau was a New York Times Notable Book; and Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
His latest book is TAKEOVER: HITLER’S FINAL RISE TO POWER (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024). It explores the final days of the Weimar Republic and its incredibly rapid transformation into the Third Reich of Nazis Germany in just a few months. We discuss it and two of his other books, HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY: THE BOOKS THAT SHAPED HIS LIFE, and HITLER’S FIRST VICTIMS: THE QUEST FOR JUSTICE.
Although there is some disputing it, Mark Twain is generally credited with observing that “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” In researching that quip, I came across this by humorist, Max Beerbohm from 1896. “History,” it has been said, “does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.” How many rhymes can you find in this interview with historian, Timothy Ryback, from his home in Berlin, Germany, recorded via Skype on Dec. 3, 2024?
Forthright Radio 