A Public Affair

From Y2K and cable TV to pro wrestling and Jerry Springer, on today’s show we relish in all the lowbrow joys of the year 1999. Host Nate Carlin is in conversation with Ross Benes author of the forthcoming book, 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times. For Benes, low culture is mass produced entertainment that is both frowned upon and popular, epitomized by pro wrestling and its aesthetic called kayfabe.

No matter how you feel about Jerry Springer, Benes argues that his brand of sensational performance is still alive and well in the political performances of Donald Trump. Springer was immensely popular, and in 1999 he beat out Oprah in TV ratings. The choreographed arguments on his show became the template for reality TV and even contemporary politics.

You can’t tell the story of 1999 without talking about the rise of teen culture. This was a time when teens became a very profitable market for brands like Beanie Babies and Pokémon. Benes says that these products were the prequel to NFTs and crypto. 

Ross Benes is the author of 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted our Bizarre Times. He’s written for many publications including Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly.

Featured image of Ross Benes, used with permission.

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On today’s show, host Esty Dinur speaks with Bill Fletcher Jr about the Trump presidency, independent media, and settler colonialism. He says that the Trump Administration’s actions have been predictable, and we know this because his advisors are taking pages out of Viktor Orbán’s playbook. 

Fletcher and Dinur talk about Elon Musk’s shift to the political right after 2020, ecofascism, Trump’s admiration of President McKinley, and the plans to turn the Gaza strip into a US development. In response to criticisms of “wokeness,” Fletcher says “it’s better to be awake than asleep.” 

Fletcher reflects on the erosion of the press, as in what’s happening right now at the Washington Post where billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, is changing the publication’s policies on opinion pieces. He says “we’re in an asymmetric battle with right-wing media,” and he urges listeners to show their support of stations like WORT that provide reliable information daily. 

Bill Fletcher Jr is a longtime trade unionist, international solidarity activist, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. He is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the author of numerous books and is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and online.

Featured image of a protest sign from the “Not My President’s Day” march at the Wisconsin capital courtesy of Eliot Hughes / WORT News.

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On today’s show guest host Bert Zipperer speaks with scholar and activist Bill Ayers. WORT News Director Chali Pittman also joins the conversation, and they talk about the presidential election and the ascent of Trumpism. Ayers says that though we’re at a precarious time, this isn’t the first frightening time. He follows Barbara Smith, who says that this is “just another day in the struggle.” They also talk about abolition, dignity, the need for people to stay engaged and get busy with acts of repair.

From the perspective of being a long-time educator, Ayers says that he’s been embarrassed to watch colleges and universities capitulate and call the cops on students. We’ve been here before during McCarthyism, reminds Ayers. 

Ayers champions public goods, like city services, housing, hospitals, and especially public and independent media. Ayers says he’s noticed the word “public” being used in a derogatory way by the Right. We need movements built by people, not people who just act passively as consumers. 

Bill Ayers is a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been a decades-long peace and social justice activist who has written extensively about social justice and freedom, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is the author of many books, the latest of which is When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation.

Featured image of When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation by Bill Ayers.

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On today’s show, host Carlos Dávalos is joined by Tony Castañeda and two Chicano artists who will be in Madison in just a few weeks. Dewey Tafoya is an artist and screen printer who makes art echoing the urban landscapes, cultures, and communities of inner city Los Angeles. Malaquias Montoya is a major figure in the Chicano Art Movement, and professor emeritus of Chicano studies at the University of California Davis. His silk screen posters are notable for addressing social justice issues like immigration, the Zapatista movement, and Palestine. 

They talk about the intersection of art and social justice and how they draw inspiration from their neighborhoods and around the world. Montoya says the artist is aware of social justice issues everyday. He got his start as an artist during the protest movements of the 60s. Tafoya compares this time period to contemporary pro-Palestine protests, including the backlash against these protests. He says the issues of the past–like poverty and housing–are only amplified in the present.

Both Montoya and Tafoya share their experiences mentoring younger generations. And they comment on the reality that though younger artists still make silk screens, they are also making digital art. They advise younger artists to create alliances with other artists, even across borders. Dávalos asks these artists about the dialog between Chicano and Mexican artists and the interplay between art as an individual and collective process. 

Tafoya and Montoya will be in conversation at a panel organized by the Chicano and Latino Studies program at UW-Madison on March 13 at Van Vleck Hall from 6-8pm. 

Dewey Tafoya is an artist and screen printer. He is  influenced by the urban landscapes, cultures and communities of the barrios of Los Angeles (unceded Tongva territory). His work deconstructs cultural and historical contexts learned from American popular culture and history to then reconstruct them through his experiences as a Chicano growing up and living in Los Angeles. He is currently the Master Printer & Assistant Director of the Professional Printmaking Program at Self Help Graphics and Art.

Malaquias Montoya was born in New Mexico and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. His entire family had to work as farm laborers for survival. His art, including acrylic paintings, murals, washes, drawings, and silkscreen prints, was enormously influential during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and remains so today. He is credited as one of the founders of the social serigraphy movement in the San Francisco Bay Area, and his work has been exhibited worldwide. After graduating form the University of California, Berkeley, he has lectured and taught at numerous colleges and Universities in his home state. He was a Professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California for twelve years, serving for five years as chair of the Ethnic Studies Department. During this period, he also directed the Taller de Artes Graficas in East Oakland. From 1989 to 2008, he was a professor at the University of California, Davis. Now a professor emeritus, he continues his artistic work, creating images of empowerment that speak to the disenfranchised.

Featured image of a print by José Guadalupe Posada via Wikimedia Commons.

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On today’s show we focus on immigrant dairy farm workers in Wisconsin. Hosts Bert Zipperer and Pete Hardin are joined by three guests: Ruth Conniff, Armando Ibarra, and John Rosenow. They discuss the humanity of immigrant farmworkers, their struggles and their dreams, their kids who attend local K-12 schools, and their families in Mexico who depend on remittances. Conniff and Rosenow are part of a group called Puentes Bridges, which organizes trips to rural Mexico to connect rural farmers across international borders. Their most recent trip to Mexico is featured in the Wisconsin Examiner. 

Conniff explains how two groups of rural farmers–in the US and in Mexico–came together over the last few decades. In the 1990s, NAFTA accelerated a trend in American agriculture called “get big or get out.” In order to keep up, US farmers needed more employees and they found Mexican farmers were eager for jobs. Rosenow was one of the first farmers in the US to hire Mexican workers in 1998. Now, Rosenow employs 18 people–13 of whom are immigrants. These workers milk 600 cows 24-hours a day.

The mass migration of farmworkers means that now in Wisconsin, roughly 70% of the labor force on dairy farms is made up of workers of Latinx descent. The majority of those workers are also unauthorized, as of a 2023 report done by Ibarra and the School for Workers. Ibarra says it’s crucial to understand the circumstances driving these demographic shifts, shifts that include the growth of Latinx populations in rural areas across Wisconsin. Hardin reiterates that the nation’s economy–and food and agriculture sector—would collapse if the immigrant workforce is deported.

Ruth Conniff is Editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner. She is the author of “Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers” which won the 2022 Studs and Ida Terkel award from The New Press.

Armando Ibarra is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the School for Workers. His research and fields of specialization are Political Economy, working communities of Latin American descent in the U.S., social movements, community development, international labor migration, community-based participatory applied, and action research.

John Rosenow is a family farm own in Buffalo County, Wisconsin. He’s a fifth generation farmer and he and his wife, Nettie, also own a compost company called Cowsmo.

Featured image of a Wisconsin dairy farm in winter via the Library of Congress.

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Already strapped public schools are scrambling in response to a letter sent by the Department of Education on February 14. The letter threatened loss of federal funding if K-12 schools and colleges don’t stop “race-based decision-making” within fourteen days. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has been threatening to disband the Department of Education. To talk about how to teach history and truth at a time like this, host Douglas Haynes is joined by Jesse Hagopian and Kimber Wilkerson. 

They discuss the Trump Administration’s intimidation of educators, book bans, the #TeachTruth movement, and the federal government’s role in providing special education services. Hagopian says that the “Dear Colleague” letter represents a coordinated attack on public education that silences Black history and weaponizes Title IX against transgender students. He adds that people who advocate book bans and attack Black education promote what Hagopian calls “uncritical race theory.”

Wilkerson says that over the last few decades, the number of students who access special education services in the US has grown, and we’re seeing higher than ever graduation rates. This shows that special education advocacy work has been successful. And there was a success last week when the lawsuit against Section 504–which bans discrimination on the basis of disability–was paused. However a program that supported special education teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools was terminated last week.

Jesse Hagopian has been an educator for over twenty years and taught for over a decade Seattle’s Garfield High School–the site of the historic boycott of the MAP test. Jesse is an editor for the social justice periodical Rethinking Schools, is the co-editor of the books, Black Lives Matter at School, Teaching for Black Lives, Teacher Unions and Social Justice, and is the editor of the book, More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing. Jesse serves as the Director of the Black Education Matters Student Activist Award and is an organizer with the Black Lives Matter at School movement.

Kimber Wilkerson is a professor of Special Education in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Wilkerson has expertise in the preparation of teachers to provide instruction to students with disabilities to improve their long-term outcomes. She also conducts research on supports for early career special educators, to help them stay in the field. She is currently co-director of a special education teacher residency program in collaboration with Milwaukee Public Schools.

Featured image of the Seal of the US Department of Education via Wikimedia Commons.

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Medicaid is a complex social safety net program that provides healthcare to over 79 million disabled and low-income adults and children. In Wisconsin, roughly 1 in 5 people were enrolled in these programs according to numbers from December of last year. 

Despite the reach and popularity of Medicaid programs, Congressional Republicans are drafting a federal budget proposal that would slash up to $2.3 trillion to Medicaid funding. These cuts could result in 20 million people being dropped from healthcare. To make sense of what these proposed cuts would mean to Wisconsinites, host Sara Gabler is joined by three guests, William Parke-Sutherland, the Government Affairs Director at Kids Forward, Lisa Hassenstab, the Public Policy Manager for Disability Rights Wisconsin, and Rene Eastman, the Senior Vice President of Policy and Finance for LeadingAge Wisconsin.

They talk about the open letter that 100 Wisconsin organizations sent to the Wisconsin Congressional Delegation asking that they protect Medicaid. Proposed cuts would have widespread impacts on people in the state, decreasing the quality of life and care for folks who are enrolled in Medicaid programs, have downstream effects on families and caregivers, and even decrease access to long term care for Medicare recipients. 

The SEIU has set up a phone line for folks to contact their representatives. And Kids Forward is proposing a plan for Wisconsin to protect healthcare and more. 

Rene Eastman is the Senior Vice President of Policy & Finance for LeadingAge Wisconsin, a trade association for aging services providers. LeadingAge Wisconsin represents over 400 nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Wisconsin. Rene is an accountant and an attorney with over a decade of experience working in healthcare policy.

Lisa Hassenstab has served as the Public Policy Manager for Disability Rights Wisconsin since July 2023. She has served primarily in public policy, advocacy, and leadership roles in the nonprofit field during her career, including with health and human services and early care and education organizations at the state and national levels.

William Parke-Sutherland is the Government Affairs Director at Kids Forward. He works to protect and expand access to affordable, quality health coverage and care–especially for those impacted by health disparities and in cycles of poverty. He also helps Kids Forward strategize paths to advance health equity in Wisconsin and move toward a system with universal access to health care for all.

Featured image via Disability Rights Wisconsin. 

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Our guest today, Ric Urrutia, is an organizer, podcaster, artist, and co-host of the We Rise Fighting! Labor Podcast. He’s hosting a free workshop tonight at the Madison Labor Temple from 6-8pm on building worker power. The workshop will show participants how to read corporate documents and analyze corporate political contributions, and think critically about corporate investments. 

Urrutia wasn’t always a labor organizer, but his awareness of class grew from watching his dad who worked at a seafood restaurant. Then, when he went to college, he learned not to be afraid of Karl Marx. He says that it’s important to read about history and economic and social theory to develop class consciousness. 

Host Allen Ruff asks Urrutia about the importance of worker generated research, current labor organizing, like at Amazon, and the connection between labor and solidarity movements. Urrutia says that we need to internationalize the labor movement, and the Palestine solidarity movement is a step in that direction. For Urrutia, the present requires that we have a big vision; the messages of “buy American” and vote for the “lesser of two evils” is not enough. 

Featured image via WORT.

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On today’s show, host Ali Muldrow speaks with Derek Black whose new book, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy, traces Black literacy between the American Revolution and Reconstruction. For Black citizens, literacy was a weapon of empowerment and rebellion, while for whites, it was the only tool that could destabilize their grip on power. Derek Black says that the ghosts of this fight live on today.

Muldrow and Black talk about leaders like Denmark Vesey who inspired thousands of enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina in the nineteenth century to seek freedom. Vesey and other literate Black leaders like David Walker were seen as a threat to Southern whites because of their widely circulated writings. Muldrow and Black also connect the history of repression of Black literacy to the present, as in attacks on DEI and low rates of Black literacy in Madison, where only 4% of Black students read at grade level. 

Derek W. Black holds the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina Law School, where he directs the university’s Constitutional Law Center.

Featured image of Dangerous Learning via Yale University Press.

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On today’s pre-recorded show, host Sara Gabler speaks with two journalists covering religion and American politics, Phoebe Petrovic and Sarah McCammon. Over the last year Gabler has been on this show to talk about her upbringing in a conservative evangelical community in the South. Today the show focuses on how the rhetoric of Christian nationalism is influencing US politics and the daily experiences of growing up as an evangelical.

Petrovic describes the rise of the Christian right and how white Christian nationalist rhetoric is influencing the Trump Administration. McCammon discusses the long and difficult process of unlearning–sometimes called “deconstructing”–the lessons of evangelical ideology. Listen to Gabler’s full interview with McCammon from last Spring.

Sarah McCammon is a National Political Correspondent for NPR and host of the NPR Politics Podcast. Her book, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, is out now in paperback. 

Phoebe Petrovic is an investigative reporter on a two-year fellowship with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Phoebe previously covered disinformation and democracy at Wisconsin Watch and was a 2022-2023 Law & Justice Journalism Project fellow.

Featured image of a bus for Concerned Women for America parked at the 2024 Republican National Convention, courtesy of Sara Gabler/WORT.

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