We live in a world shaped by the anti-communist campaign waged by the United States during the Cold War, argues journalist Vincent Bevins.

Today, we’re in conversation with Vincent Bevins about his new book, The Jakarta Method, in which he chronicles the hidden story of the United States’ involvement in killing nearly one million Indonesian citizens in 1965 and creating the political landscape for extreme right-wing movements to take hold in Latin America.

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist and correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post and previously served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (PublicAffairs, 2020).

The pandemic and attendant economic crisis have laid bare the enormous power imbalances in contemporary American work life.

Today, we speak with sociologist Erin Hatton about her new book Coerced, in which she looks at four distinct groups of workers—from prisoners and welfare workers to graduate students and college athletes—who are not often recognized as “employees,” thereby making them vulnerable to exploitation.

Over the course of the hour, she identifies how coercion and precarity characterize work life for so many Americans and makes the case for unions and expanded worker rights for all.

Erin Hatton is an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, where her research focuses on work and political economy. She is the author of The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America (Temple University Press, 2011) and Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (University of California Press, 2020).

In the wake of the budding #MeToo movement in 2017, feminist philosopher Kate Manne published her timely and critically-acclaimed debut about misogyny, Down Girl. She’s back this year with a new book, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women.

Today, we host Kate Manne on the show for a conversation about male entitlement and how it affects society, from rape culture to women’s healthcare to “mansplaining” and beyond.

Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University. She is the author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Crown, 2020).

Note: This pledge drive interview was edited to remove parts of the show dedicated to station fundraising. We thank our listeners for their generous support.

“It’s a logistics story first and foremost, but it’s been reported as a Donald Trump story,” says journalist Alex Shephard of all the recent reporting on the United States Postal Service. “When you look at the full story of why the USPS is in crisis, it’s much more complicated and interesting.”

Today on the show, Alex joins us to tell this story, which he argues we need to understand if we’re going to fix this vital American institution. Over the course of the hour, he and host Patty Peltekos along with co-pilot Yuri Rashkin discuss the financial history of the USPS, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, the role of Congress in creating postal reform, the postal service’s “sweetheart deal” with Amazon, the problem of public services being asked to be run like for-profit businesses, why concerns about vote by mail are unfounded, and more.

Alex Shephard is a staff writer at The New Republic and co-founder of the digital magazine Full Stop. You can read his piece “Why the Media Is Uniquely Terrible at Covering the U.S. Postal Service” here.

Cover photo by Sam LaRussa on Unsplash

On Tuesday, the Trump administration hosted a ceremony celebrating a new peace agreement between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

“The problem is that it’s not a peace agreement,” says lawyer and activist Huwaida Arraf. Today, we’re joined by Arraf to talk about the problem with Trump’s “peace deals” and why she protested at the White House this week.

Huwaida Arraf is a Palestinian American activist, lawyer, and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization focused on assisting the Palestinian side of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict using non-violent protests.

Cover image: “President Donald J. Trump shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” by The White House

The far-right movement isn’t monolithic—it’s a complex spectrum of organizations and ideologies. To help us break it down, today Allen is joined by Matthew N. Lyons, co-author of the landmark book Right-Wing Populism in America, to discuss the evolution of rightist trends and the rise of fascism in the U.S.

With the help of listener callers, they discuss white nationalism, the far right’s relationship to the Constitution, the politics that paved the way for Trump, the meaning of fascism, and the interplay between right-wing movements and systems of oppression.

Matthew N. Lyons is a writer and longtime observer of right-wing politics. He is the author of Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (PM Press, 2018) and co-author with Chip Berlet of Right-Wing Populism in America (Guilford Press, 2000). He writes regularly for the radical antifascist blog Three Way Fight.

Cover photo: Charlottesville “Unite the Right” Rally by Anthony Crider, shared under CC BY 2.0

There’s been a drastic uptick in reported stress, anxiety, and depression since the start of the pandemic. Today on the show, we discuss what it means to support our mental health and well-being during this time of upheaval with mental healthcare professionals Lisa Baker and Myra McNair.

It’s an hour of “real talk” about the struggle to maintain balance during disrupted schedules, provide structure for kids and families, and make self-care a priority even with new demands on our time and energy—especially as caregivers, activists, and workers in helping professions.

Lisa Baker is a practicing therapist and the founder and CEO of Lisa Baker Consulting. She is a faculty member in the Social Innovation and Sustainability Leadership Graduate Program at Edgewood College.

Myra McNair is a licensed marriage and family therapist and executive director at the Anesis Center for Therapy.

Cover photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash

What is school discipline like during virtual learning? First up today, we talk with Aaricka Washington, statewide education reporter for Chalkbeat Indiana, about her recent New York Times op-ed, “The Inanity of Zoom School Suspensions.”

Then, we’re joined by Cap Times K–12 education reporter Scott Girard to learn about the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s temporary injunction against Dane County’s public health order prohibiting in-person classes for grades 3–12.

Cover photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

In the summer of 1998, Time magazine asked, “Is Feminism Dead?” In reality, it was very much alive. On the margins of mainstream media coverage, lesbians, women of color, and international coalitions were paving the way for 21st-century feminism, including the 2017 Women’s March and the #MeToo movement.

On today’s show, guest host Nan Enstad explores this untold history of 90s feminism and its connection to our current moment with historian Lisa Levenstein. “I set out to research feminism in the 90s,” says Levenstein, “but the story I found was about women of color, working-class women, and LGBT activists.” And this vast and sprawling movement two decades ago, she argues, gives us insight into how we can mobilize today under an intersectional banner.

Lisa Levenstein is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where her research focuses on women and gender studies, transnational and U.S. feminism, and postwar social movements. She is the author of A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (UNC Press, 2009) and They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties (Basic Books, 2020).

Cover photo of the DC Women’s March by chloe s. on Unsplash

As we approach the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11, today we turn our attention to the five-trillion-dollar “war on terror” and the construction the racialized terrorist in the American imagination with professor Deepa Kumar, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.

Deepa Kumar is a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, where she researchers Islamophobia, empire, culture, gender, race, class in the media, neoliberalism, labor, and social class. She is the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Haymarket, 2012). Her latest article, “Terrorcraft: Empire and the Making of the Racialized Terrorist Threat,” is available here.

Cover photo by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash