Seattle photographer, Nate Gowdy, has documented over 340 political events and protests across 25 states. He flew from GA to Washington, D.C. the night before January 6, 2021 to cover the much publicized so-called “Stop the Steal” Rally on the Ellipse.
He was about a mile away and heading to that rally along the national mall, when a couple of hundred Proud Boys marched toward him and the US Capitol from the Rally at 10:45am – hours before Trump was scheduled to speak. Having photographed many political events and demonstrations, he recognized some of them, and made the decision to turn and follow them, soon becoming swept along the growing flood of extremists to the very steps of the Capitol.
“10:43:47 am I recognize Ethan Nordean, a notorious Proud Boys brawler from the Seattle area known as ‘Rufio Panman,’ holding a bullhorn. To his left are Zach Rehl of Philadelphia and Joe Biggs of Florida. The three Proud boys lieutenants, each of whom is later charged with seditious conspiracy, lead chants of ‘Fuck Antifa!’ as they trek across the otherwise sparsely populated National Mall.”
His photographic compilation, Insurrection, not only documents the events of that day when our democracy hung by the thinnest of blue lines, but contributes to the art form of war photography in the highest traditions of Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White and Matthew Brady. We spoke with him via Skype on January 11, 2023.
“3:35:18PM – ‘Cowboys for Trump’ founder, Couy Griffin, incites the mob in insurrection. In September 2022, a New Mexico state judge rules that, under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the Otero County Commissioner is disqualified from public office. The decision is the first of its kind since 1869, and the first time that any court rules the events of January 6th, 2021, an insurrection. In August 2022, I travel to Santa Fe to serve as the plaintiffs’ eyewitness in the landmark two-day trial.”
Dr. Michael Shermer is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the co-founder of The Skeptics Society and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. He has been a college professor since 1979, teaching courses such as Skepticism 101. He was a monthly columnist for Scientific American for 18 years.
Among his books are WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS; WHY DARWIN MATTERS; THE SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL, and GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE: REFLECTIONS OF A SCIENTIFIC HUMANIST. His latest book, CONSPIRACY: WHY THE RATIONAL BELIEVE THE IRRATIONAL, is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
We spoke with him via Skype on December 5, 2022. The next day, a New York jury found The Trump Organization guilty of 17 felonies, including conspiracy. The day after that, 3,000 officers conducted searches at 130 sites in 11 of Germany’s 16 states against the group, Reich Citizens, whose members it said adhered to a conglomerate of conspiracy theories, including the QAnon cult and the so-called Reich Citizens movement.
Articles and videos pertinent to this interview can be found here:
Christopher Marquis is Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at the Judge Business School of The University of Cambridge.
He and his co-author, Kunyaun Qiao, have written the book, MAO AND MARKETS: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise, published by Yale University Press. It explores the seeming contradiction of capitalism under Chinese Communist Party rule. Part history, part economics, it uses the tools of academic data analysis to assess how China’s economic success is being shaped by the ideology and philosophy of Chairman Mao Zedong.
Professor Marquis’s interest in China began while he was in high school, when he did an independent research project on the role of Confucianism in contemporary China. He first traveled there in 1996, and he has marveled at the speed with which the mudflats across the Huangpu River from Shanghai’s waterfront became the city of Pudong, the financial capital of China, where three of the tallest buildings in the world now stand encircled by 20 miles of high rises. He spoke with entrepreneurs from many regions of China and brings their very human stories to his narrative.
His earlier book, BETTER BUSINESS: HOW THE B CORP MOVEMENT IS REMAKING CAPITALISM, focused on the ways companies can effectively shift from a shareholder to stake holder orientation.
We spoke with Christopher Marquis on November 21, 2022.
After learning of President Xi’s early life experiences – his being “sent down” from Beijing to manual labor in a remote, rural area for 7 years after the purging and arrest of his father, Xi Zhongxun, during the Cultural Revolution, made me think of his contemporary, Ai Weiwei, and his early life experiences. Born in 1957 in Beijing, he was exiled in 1958 when his father, poet Ai Qing, was accused of “rightism”. How differently the two men influence the world today. One, a ruthless authoritarian consolidating close to absolute control over the lives of 1.4 billion people, and the other undaunted, despite brutal state repression, in his artistic expression of beauty, creativity and human rights.
We end this edition of Forthright Radio with excerpts from an interview with Ai Weiwei from Oct. 9, 2017 on Democracy Now! You can link to the full interview here: World-Renowned Artist Ai Weiwei on His Childhood in a Labor Camp, Art, Activism, Prison & Freedomhttps://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/9/world_renowned_artist_ai_weiwei_on
This Forthright Radio is devoted to digesting the results of the 2022 mid-term elections. Days after the election, there are still many crucial races that are too close to call, and it is too early to know which parties will control either chamber of congress. However the predicted Red Wave – or what some were projecting as a Red Tsunami – has not occurred. So, we were delighted to welcome back two distinguished guests, David Daley and Paul Pierson.
Dave Daley was our guest in June of 2020, when his book, UNRIGGED: HOW AMERICANS ARE BATTLING BACK TO SAVE DEMOCRACY, came out. His earlier book, RATF**KED: THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE SECRET PLAN TO STEAL AMERICA’S DEMOCRACY, did much to educate us about the nationally organized, anti-democracy efforts to seize political control from the majority of voters via gerrymandering, and what citizens across the country are doing to wrestle majoritarian democracy back. His articles appear in many outlets, including The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, among others.
Paul Pierson was our guest in July of 2020, when his book, co-written with Jacob Hacker, director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and a Political Science Professor at Yale University, LET THEM EAT TWEETS: HOW THE RIGHT RULES IN AN AGE OF EXTREME INEQUALITY, came out. Paul is is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at U. C. Berkeley. They have many earlier books, including, WINNER-TAKE-ALL-POLITICS: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class; and Off Center: The Republican Revolution and The Erosion of American Democracy.
Award winning author and journalist, Adam Hochschild, is the author of eleven books. He returned to Forthright Radio to discuss his latest book, AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: THE GREAT WAR, A VIOLENT PEACE, AND DEMOCRACY’S FORGOTTEN CRISIS, published by Mariner Books.
While a college student in the early 1960s, Adam Hochschild worked on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa, and he was also a civil rights worker in Mississippi. He was a writer and editor for Ramparts magazine, and a co-founder of Mother Jones. He has been a lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Journalism for many years. In 2014, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In our earlier interviews, he discussed his books, BURY THE CHAINS: PROPHETS AND REBELS IN THE FIGHT TO FREE AN EMPIRE’S SLAVES, and KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST: A STORY OF GREED, TERROR AND HEROISM IN COLONIAL AFRICA.
Military Intelligence Chief for NYC and virulent anti-immigrant proponent, John B. Trevor’s, “ethnic battle map” of upper Manhattan. Red for Jews, brown for Italians, grey for Blacks, blue for Irish. Circles are meeting halls. Stars are publication offices.
We spoke with him via telephone from his home in the Bay Area on October 25, 2022.
On September 18, 1947, the National Security Act, a major restructuring of the US Military and intelligence agencies went into effect. It created The National Security Council and The Central Intelligence Agency, headed by the Director of Central Intelligence. Our guest today on Forthright Radio is Professor of American History, emeritus, at the University of Edinburgh, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. His latest book, A QUESTION OF STANDING: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA, published by Oxford University Press, examines how the influence of the CIA has shifted with its standing with different presidents, Congresses, and the US as well as international public over time.
His reputation as an intelligence authority has been long established with earlier books such as, THE CIA AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY; CLOAK AND DOLLAR: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN SECRET INTELLIGENCE; IN SPIES WE TRUST: THE STORY OF WESTERN INTELLIGENCE; and THE FBI: A HISTORY. We spoke with Professor Jeffreys-Jones on October 11, 2022 via Skype from his home in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Reece Jones is a Professor of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His latest book, NOBODY IS PROTECTED: HOW THE BORDER PATROL BECAME THE MOST DANGEROUS POLICE FORCE IN THE UNITED STATES, is published by Counterpoint Press.
He is the editor-in-chief of the journal, Geopolitics, and co-editor of the Routledge Geopolitics Book Series with Klaus Dodds. He is best know for his work on border walls, the militarization of borders, and the rise in migrant deaths. His earlier books include Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move ; Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement; and Placing the Border in Everyday Life . Among his numerous awards is a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In NOBODY IS PROTECTED: HOW THE BORDER PATROL BECAME THE MOST DANGEROUS POLICE FORCE IN THE UNITED STATES, he traces the history of the Border Patrol, from its creation, quietly tucked into The Labor Appropriation Act of 1924. He writes “Its sole mission was to enforce the new eugenics-derived rules about who could enter the United States.” For most of its existence it was a small, underfunded agency, a mere 1,500 agents in the 1970s, until the 21st century, when it has become “a modern, sophisticated paramilitary force of over19,000 agents that asserts the legal right to sweep people off the streets of an American city without a warrant or even probable cause that a crime was committed.” Citizens and noncitizen alike. As Justice Thurgood Marshall noted, NOBODY IS PROTECTED. We spoke with Reece Jones on September 20, 2022.
We end the program with the poem with which Amanda Gorman opened the 2022 United Nations General Assembly on September 19, 2022.
Broadcaster, journalist, author, and four time winner of the Project Censored Award, Thom Hartmann returned to Forthright Radio with his latest book in The Hidden History Series: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALSIM: HOW REAGANISM GUTTED AMERICA AND HOW TO RESTORE ITS GREATNESS.
This is number eight in the series, and it joins his more than thirty other books.
After the interview with Thom Hartmann, we share excerpts from a speech by Bernie Sanders at a rally of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers in the UK on August 31, 2022.
Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, Jacob M. Grumbach, is a Faculty Associate with the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. His research focuses on the political economy of the United States, with an emphasis on public policy, racial and economic inequality, American Federalism, health policy, climate change and statistical methods.
His book, LABORATORIES AGAINST DEMOCRACY: HOW NATIONAL PARTIES TRANSFORMED STATE POLITICS, which investigates the causes and consequences of the nationalization of state politics since the 1970s, is published by Princeton U. Press.
Jamie Susskind is a British barrister and the author of the multiple awards winning bestseller, FUTURE POLITICS: LIVING TOGETHER IN A WORLD TRANSFORMED BY TECH.
His latest book is THE DIGITAL REPUBLIC: ON FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY IN THE 21st CENTURY, published on July 5, 2022 by Pegasus Books.
In it he addresses questions like: Is it possible to “democratize” digital technology? What kinds of rules and standards should govern important algorithms? Should powerful figures in the tech industry be regulated, like doctors or lawyers, or even hair salon workers? Is anti-trust law fit for the purpose? What rules should govern the use and abuse of personal data? Can we regulate social media without stifling freedom of speech?
With more and more news reports of the damage that digital technology is doing to individuals as well as our democracy, Jamie Susskind’s insights into the problems and challenges to reforming this largely unregulated industry are helpful for citizens grappling with the many issues with which we are faced.
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