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 King’s significant sermons, speeches, published writings, correspondence and unpublished papers.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?
This edition of Forthright Radio marks the 20th anniversary of the first program that day after Thanksgiving in 2004. I am deeply grateful to Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, KZYXfm, and all the listeners who support community radio, for having given me the opportunity to host and produce Forthright Radio.
Bruce Gourely is an historian specializing in American History and the editor of Church & State magazine, the publication of Washington D.C. based Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He is an award winning author and photographer. Among his nine books are Crucible of Faith and Freedom: Baptists and the American Civil War; Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia During the American Civil War. He also owns and operates the website, Yellowstone.net.
I recently had the opportunity to hear Bruce Gourely speak right after the recent election, and I immediately invited him to share his thoughts as an historian and a person dedicated to to preserving our First Amendment rights to help prepare us for what will surely be challenging times ahead. We spoke with him on November 19th, 2024 in the Beyond the Deep End studio.
““The women in Congress had to wage virtually every battle alone,” Schroeder wrote in her memoir of those early years, “whether we were fighting for female pages (there were none) or a place where we could pee.” That’s right. For many years, women didn’t have a bathroom off the House floor like the men did. When Schroeder was there, women were forced to use the restroom inside the women’s reading room far off on another floor. Female members of the House didn’t get a women’s bathroom off the House floor until 2011.”
Professor M. V. Ramana, a physicist by training, is Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and the director of the graduate program at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He previously worked at the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security, both at Princeton University. He is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Material, The International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, and the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. His earlier books are The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India, and Bombing Bombay? Effects of Nuclear Weapons and a Case Study of a Hypothetical Explosion.
Increasingly alarmed by more and more reports of well respected climate scientists, such as James Hansen, who promote nuclear energy as an important part of responding to rapidly increasing climate catastrophes, we spoke with Professor Ramana via Skype on November 4, 2024 about his latest book, NUCLEAR IS NOT THE SOLUTION: THE FOLLY OF ATOMIC POWER IN THE AGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE, published by Verso.
Arlie Russell Hochschild is University of California Berkeley Professor Emerita of Sociology. She is the author of many groundbreaking books, including THE SECOND SHIFT, WORKING FAMILIES AND THE REVOLUTION AT HOME; THE TIME BIND, WHEN WORK BECOMES HOME AND HOME BECOMES WORK; and her best selling book, STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND, ANGER AND MOURNING ON THE AMERICAN RIGHT, was a National Book Award finalist. In addition to her many honorary degrees from Harvard, and European universities, She also received the Ulysses medal from University College, Dublin, and the Helmholtz Medal from the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. And if that weren’t enough, she was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2022.
Her most recent book is STOLEN PRIDE: LOSS, SHAME, AND THE RISE OF THE RIGHT, published by The New Press in September, 2024. In it she explores the question, what happens when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffers the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel “stolen?” Dr. Hochschild, prompted by CA Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, who was working with KY-5th District Republican Congressman, Hal Rodgers, went to Pikeville in the heart of Appalachia in his district, which is the whitest and second poorest in the United States. 30 years ago, it was in the political center, but in 2016 and 2020, Trump received 80% of the district’s vote.
26 year old Neo-Nazi, Matthew Heimbach, sought a permit for a white supremacist march to be held there on April 30, 2017. It turned out to be a trial run for the August Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, for which he was a core organizer. He is just one of the people she interviewed and followed, and whose character actually evolved in surprising ways. We spoke with Arlie Russell Hochschild from her home in Berkeley, CA via Skype on October 22, 2024.
In honoring the passing of Fernando Valenzuela, hero for Dodgers and Mexican baseball fans, who died on October 22, at age of 63, and whose team, the LA Dodgers face the New York Yankees in the first game of the World Series that evening, we ended this edition with beloved poet/publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ode to Latino baseball, “Baseball Canto.”
Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. A historian of the modern U.S., she is the author of several award-winning books, most recently, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. A New York Times bestseller, it was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs and the Lillian Smith Book Award for outstanding writing about the U.S. South.
She is accompanying the documentary, BAD FAITH: Christian Nationalism’s UnHoly War on Democracy, conducting Q&A sessions afterward. In Montana alone she is visiting Missoula, Helena, Bozeman, Great Falls and Billings, in addition to screenings in other states.
David Daley is the author of the national bestseller Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, which has been credited for kick-starting the national drive to end gerrymandering; and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy.
He returned to discuss his assiduously researched, well written and important latest book, ANTIDEMOCRATIC: INSIDE THE FAR RIGHT’S 50 YEAR PLOT TO CONTROL AMERICAN ELECTIONS, published by Mariner Books. It follows on the themes of those earlier books, and it couldn’t be coming at a more crucial time in our nation’s history’s, as we reel towards this tumultuous 2024 election, as democracy itself seems to be on the brink.
In addition to his books, David’s journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian, and he is the former editor in chief of Salon.com, as well as a senior fellow at FairVote. He has taught journalism and political science at Wesleyan University, Boston College, Smith College and the University of Georgia. We spoke with him via Skype on September 26, 2024.
Links to some articles pertinent to this interview:
In this edition of Forthright Radio our guest is retired Federal Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, David S. Tatel. After many years as a civil rights attorney in private practice and public service, he was nominated by President Bill Clinton in June of 1994 to the seat vacated by Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when she ascended to the Supreme Court. After only a one hour hearing and unanimous vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was confirmed by the full Senate in a voice vote. In the 1970s, he was the founding Director of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and then director of the national Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. During the Carter Administration, he served as the Director of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. By that time, he was fully blind, after the gradually progressing deterioration of his vision due to the genetic condition, retinitis pigmentosa.
His book, VISION: A MEMOIR OF BLINDNESS AND JUSTICE, was published by Little, Brown and Company in June of 2024. It’s the story of one individual’s journey in the service of justice through many historical moments – from John F. Kennedy, who inspired him to the nobility of public service, through the Donald J. Trump’s administration’s harangues against “The Deep State” and the mockery of the very idea of service, to his decision to retire from the bench during the Biden administration, so as not to repeat the strategically tragic decision of his friend, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, not to retire. As you will hear in this interview, the lack of judicial restraint by the Republican appointees of the current Supreme Court, and their ideological overturning of well established precedents in civil rights and environmental cases contributed to his decision to retire when he did from that position he loved.
But it’s not just a memoir of his legal experiences or philosophy. It’s a very human love story – for his wife of almost 60 years, his four children, and most recently, his guide dog, Vixen, as well as a memoir of his blindness, vulnerability, and rising above disability to his decades of public service.
We spoke with Judge Tatel via Skype from his home in rural Virginia on August 19, 2024.
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