A Public Affair

On today’s show host Esty Dinur speaks again with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson about the decline of the American empire. Wilkerson says that on both the global and domestic fronts, the nation is doing very badly. 

We’re less secure and safe than we’ve ever been in a general sense. In a national security sense, we’re doing better than ever, but there’s one major exception: nuclear weapons. The US has destroyed every nuclear treaty created during the Cold War and he worries about how the nation may deploy them again as it loses power on a global scale. Wilkerson says that the US made a grave mistake by getting involved in Ukraine and Iran and in so doing forcing Russia and China together.

Internally, the nation is also in deep trouble because since 9/11 we’ve surrendered a great many of our civil liberties, and thus our democracy. He says that 9/11 was used as an opening for anti-democratic legislation and we’re “paying the piper” because the billionaires behind Trump are taking advantage. Wilkerson says the technocrats are intent on their own security and would rather see a corporate board running the country than democracy. 

They also talk about the US’s involvement in proxy wars, how Christian nationalism helps the administration “sanctify” their actions, the situation in Gaza, ICE raids, and more. 

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired US Army Colonel who worked for the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and, after retirement from the military, for the U.S. Secretary of State. He taught national security affairs for six years at the George Washington University and for 16 years at the College of William & Mary. Today, he’s affiliated with the Eisenhower Media Network.

Featured image: “A Thing Well Begun Is Half Done” by Victor Gillan from 1899, via Wikimedia Commons.

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On today’s show, host Allen Ruff speaks with longtime friend of the show Matt Rothschild who has been sounding the alarm about Trump since his first term as president. Recently he’s had speaking engagements across Dane County to talk about the dangers of MAGA and Trumpism. 

Rothschild says he can smell a fascist a mile away, and he’s frustrated by the willful minimization and normalization of Trump and MAGA. When mainstream media outlets say that Trump doesn’t have a worldview, Rothschild offers a correction: Trump has a worldview, and it’s a racist worldview. He’s started using the word “fascist” to describe Trump and his movement because Trump has a mass base, demonizes immigrants with his slogan “mass deportation now,” and promotes ultra nationalism. 

They also talk about Trump’s attacks on the pillars of civil society (like the judiciary, press, and universities), the funding of ICE, the masculinist appeal of Trumpism, and the need for continued action like the No Kings protests.

Matt Rothschild is the former executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and was previously the senior editor of the Progressive Magazine.

Featured image: photo of Matt Rothschild and Allen Ruff courtesy of Sara Gabler/WORT.

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In the early morning of July 3, Governor Evers signed the two-year Wisconsin state budget after months of debate about funding for education, childcare, and more. The next day, President Trump signed into law the Big Beautiful Bill, which guts Medicaid and will result in the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest Americans. At the state and national levels, the quality of our healthcare, childcare, and education system is in jeopardy, and to break down how these budgets will impact folks in Wisconsin and across the country, host Ali Muldrow is joined by State Representative Francesca Hong and Angela Lang.

They talk about the impact of the budget, including its shortcomings. Lang says she’s disappointed with the new state budget because Gov. Evers vetoed the proposal to close the Green Bay prison. Meanwhile, Wisconsin spends more money on incarceration than anything else and it seems impossible to make cuts to the prison system. There’s not enough political will to do so, says Lang.

Rep. Hong says that the current budget compromised too much to Republicans and didn’t fund education as they should have. She says that we have to think of budgets as moral documents, documents that should be representative of the needs of Wisconsinites. But the current budget gives zero new dollars to education in the state, and this is a tragedy for democracy and a missed opportunity for the state budget to provide a level of protection from the Trump budget.

They also discuss the status of the Democratic party in the state, how race and racism affect voters, how to energize folks on the Left, including supporting Democratic leaders who are fighters. As Muldrow says, “We’re on this ship together, whether it’s sinking or floating.”

Francesca Hong is a mom, service industry worker, and community organizer. Elected in 2020, she is the first Asian American legislator in the Wisconsin State Legislature, representing the 76th Assembly District in Madison. She is an original author of the Economic Justice Bill of Rights and prioritizes progressive legislation, including universal school meals, paid leave for all, and fully funded public education.

Angela Lang was born and raised in the heart of Milwaukee. She has an extensive background in community organizing. Angela has served as both an organizer and State Council Director for the Service Employees International Union, working on such campaigns as the Fight for 15. Before joining BLOC’s team as Executive Director, Angela was the Political Director with For Our Future Wisconsin.

Featured image of a person holding up a sign at a rally in front of the Milwaukee Public School Administration in 2018 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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In a September 2024 presidential election debate, Kamala Harris said, “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners.” Nationally, democrats are becoming gun owners at a higher rate than conservatives. To talk about spiking demand for gun ownership and gun education, especially among queer-centered self-defense organizations, guest host Matvei Mozhaev is joined by Youtuber, Tacticool Girlfriend.

They talk about what self defense and protection mean within marginalized communities in the US. Tacticool says that US gun culture is too driven by consumption, and not driven enough by safety, including environmental safety, and suicide prevention. And US gun culture needs to do a better job of normalizing different gun owners who aren’t the typical cisgender, heterosexual male. But we also have to be careful to not sensationalize queer people with guns. 

Instead of leaning into the power fantasy of gun ownership, Tacticool says she leans into the realism of gun ownership. That means focusing on safety and education, as well as understanding that self-defense means a lot of other things, from pepper spray to martial arts, and other non-lethal options. Tacticool says that in most cases, firearms aren’t a good option for protecting marginalized communities and that there are other things we can do to protect people, like having more affordable housing, healthcare, food, mental health support, etc.

Tacticool says that people who favor gun control are not facing the fact that guns aren’t going away. And it’s ideologically inconsistent to say that private citizens shouldn’t own guns meanwhile the state, military, and police, are allowed guns without a second thought. 

Tacticool Girlfriend is a trans woman of Afghan descent. She curates a YouTube channel about self-defense.

Featured image of a person wearing gun safety equipment via Pexels.

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On today’s show, host Douglas Haynes is joined by philosopher and writer, John Sanbonmatsu to talk about his book, The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves,  published last month from NYU Press. Sanbonmatsu says that there’s a better way to be on this planet than approaching animals with dominion and violence.

Sanbonmatsu felt compelled to write this book after studying the politics of the Left and reading works like Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, in which Singer says we have to take animal suffering into account. People don’t think of our animal-food system as political, but it is, says Sanbonmatsu. When the animal-food system comes up, it’s framed as the terrors of animal agriculture from an environmentalist lens. But we kill 80 billion land animals and three trillion marine animals every year, and there’s no way to do this killing nicely.

His book riffs on the title of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but Sanbonmatsu says “you can’t have your meat and conscience too.” Pollan created an intellectual scaffolding for food movements that were already underway: new agrarianism and organic foods. While this “new meat renaissance” hasn’t made a dent in the scale of industrial animal agriculture, it has made the meat consumer feel “conscious.”

Sanbonmatsu takes listeners through the centuries of different responses to humans’ relationship with animal life, talks about how humans developed an ethical objection to killing and eating animals, and unpacks the language people use when they describe trying to eat ethically.

John Sanbonmatsu is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. He is the editor of Critical Theory and Animal Liberation and author of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject.

Featured image: the cover of The Omnivore’s Deception, available from NYU Press.

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Norman Stockwell sits in for Allen Ruff today to debrief with Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute. They talk about Trump’s decision to bomb Iran and the history of the US’s intervention in the Middle East that got us here today. 

Sheline says Israel and the US’s bombing of Iran caught Iran off guard because Trump seemed to be engaged in good-faith negotiations. The diplomatic process broke down even though Tulsi Gabbard testified that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. 

Iran was enriching uranium for civilian purposes, something it can legally do through the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But Israel has developed nuclear weapons even though it has not signed the NPT. Sheline says that the US media has tried to emphasize that we should be afraid of Iran’s nuclear program and has used some of the same rhetoric from the Iraq War to do so.

That also breakdown Trump’s relationship to Netanyahu, how US aid and contractors are contributing to violence in Israel and Iran, and how the history of US in Iran has shaped Trump’s recent actions. Sheline says she is hopeful that a generational shift is happening as people watch what Israel and the US military and aid groups are doing in Gaza.

Annelle Sheline, PhD, is a research fellow in the Middle East program. She previously served as a Foreign Affairs Officer at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor’s Office of Near Eastern Affairs (DRL/NEA), before resigning in March 2024 in protest over the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israeli military operations in Gaza.

Featured image of US and Israeli flags via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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This morning the Wisconsin Supreme Court ensured access to abortion care in the state by ruling that an 1849 law banning abortion cannot be enforced. This news comes on the heels of the three-year anniversary of the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme and in the same week as the US Congress could vote to defund Planned Parenthood. To talk about the status of reproductive rights, host Ali Muldrow is joined by Analiese Eicher of Planned Parenthood, Wisconsin. 

Eicher says that people are feeling this as a victory of reproductive freedom and human dignity. But Planned Parenthood will continue to fight to make abortion care more accessible. 

The organization will face other challenges if Congress passes the Big Beautiful Bill, which would gut Medicaid and defund Planned Parenthood. The effect would be dramatic and terrible because federally qualified health centers could not replace Planned Parenthood. We’re seeing simultaneous attacks on reproductive rights and poverty as the GOP seeks to strip Medicaid funds. And this will reduce people’s ability to get cancer screenings, contraception, and more through BadgerCare. 

Analiese Eicher works for Planned Parenthood Wisconsin and has served on the Dane County Board of Supervisors since 2018.

Featured image of an abortion rights activist via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

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Many people conflate the anti-communist Red Scare of post-World War II America with the Hollywood blacklists portrayed in movies and TV shows or, particularly in Wisconsin, with McCarthyism. Today, guest host Christina Lieffring speaks with Clay Risen about his new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, in which he shows that the movement was much bigger than one industry or one man. The Red Scare was the first time there was a large-scale conspiratorial fear of the federal government such that progressive ideas became un-American.

Risen says that far-left activism has deep roots in America, even before the founding of the American Communist Party. But the communist movement took off in the 1920s and grew to its height in the 30s and 40s. Though the socialist movement was more popular, the communists drew attention because of their connection to the Soviet Union. The movement found early engagement in the Midwest among agricultural and industrial workers, and by the 30s had broadened its base to folks in cities. 

At its core, the Red Scare was a response to two ideas circulating in America; the idea of a New America, built around strong governments and social supports, embodied in the New Deal, and an isolationist, Protestant nation with limited government. They also discuss key figures in this history, from big political figures like J. Edgar Hoover and Henry Wallace to everyday folk like the antifascist Helen Reid Bryan who got caught up on the Red Scare and labor leader Harry Bridges who signed an anti-communist oath and was still kicked out of his union. 

Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and a fellow at the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American history, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century, as well as his most recent book on McCarthyism, Red Scare. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two young children.

Featured image: the cover of Red Scare by Clay Risen. 

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Last week huge swaths of North America experienced record high temperatures, and the Alaskan arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the globe. To talk about the ways that climate change is affecting rural communities in Alaska, host Douglas Haynes is joined by ProPublica and KYUK journalist, Emily Schwing, about her recent article, “Newtok, Alaska, Was Supposed to Be a Model for Climate Relocation. Here’s How It Went Wrong.”

Schwing says that there are over 140 communities in Alaska like Newtok facing coastal erosion, permafrost deterioration, and the implosion of infrastructure. Now, part of the Newtok community has been relocated to Mertarvik, but this isn’t the first time the people of Newtok have moved, and each time it hasn’t been a choice. As the Trump administration continues to cut funding that could be used to address climate change impacts in these communities it will be harder and harder to respond to the urgency and complexity of the existential crisis we face. 

When Schwing first started reporting on the relocation of the Indigenous community of Newtok, she thought it would develop into a solutions journalism story, but quickly learned that the impacts of climate change, federal bureaucracy, and infrastructure collapse were having a direct impact on the people of Newtok. The folks who live in these communities deserve to keep their sense of place, their traditional livelihoods, and outsiders shouldn’t get to decide where they can live. 

Emily Schwing has covered lands and wildlife management, natural disasters, local government and Indigenous affairs extensively for public radio stations in Alaska and beyond since 2006. Schwing has worked all over the northernmost state from the Chukchi Sea coast to the Wrangell Narrows and from the Canadian border to the far reaches of the Aleutian Chain. Her work has been published by NPR, The Washington Post and High Country News, and she was part of The New York Times’ 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning COVID-19 tracking team.

Featured image: photo of permafrost erosion in Alaska by Benjamin Jones, USGS via Flickr.

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On today’s show, host Carlos Dávalos speaks with scholar, Danny Parker, about her on-the-ground research on unhoused folks in Madison. Often we’re presented with a very top-down picture of civic infrastructure, but Parker reports from the front lines and focuses on the lived realities of the most vulnerable in our communities.

Parker’s early ethnographic work took place in Madison. She spent years sitting on sidewalks with unhoused people, eating and going to the hospital with them, and watching how the world responded to the people she was with. Based on her comparative analysis of Madison and rural Appalachia, she says that though things aren’t perfect in Madison, she’d rather be unhoused here because at least she would have a chance.

She says that Madison officials meet regularly with outreach organizations and that those organizations hire peer advocates to build trust with people living on the street who may trust a case worker. Sometimes these processes break down, but at least they exist and there is an expectation of dialogue. Parker adds that journalists should be paying attention to issues facing unhoused folks and when they do they should give them a voice, like a recent piece in Tone Madison. 

They also talk about systemic issues like the lack of affordable housing and the criminalization of poverty. On top of these issues is societal stigma, which Parker says she saw on a daily basis. While she was in Madison she would see her colleagues at UW-Madison pass by unhoused folks on the street and not even acknowledge them. Then at a committee meeting they would announce their support of “marginalized communities.” Parker wants this kind of hypocrisy to end. She says that “everyone is connected to everyone else, and we all get hungry.”

Danny Parker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her research examines the role communication ecologies play in the reproduction of poverty and the development of political identity. She is an ethnographer who chronicles the lived experiences of extremely impoverished rural and urban communities by living among them and documenting their everyday lives.

Featured image: a view of State Street via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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