How Trump happened is a question a lot of people ask. From an aggressive foreign policy to an immigration crackdown to cutting Medicaid to tax breaks for the super-rich to undermining environmental regulations and much more. Where did these policies originate? A good place to start is Project 2025. It’s a detailed 900+ page agenda designed to reshape the government, specifically focusing on expanding executive power and implementing conservative policies across federal agencies. Organized by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is a road map for this administration. Its policies have generated pushback. Recent polls show rising opposition. David Brooks, the noted PBS conservative commentator, says of Trump, “This is the most imperial presidency in American history.”

Speaker: Gerald Horne

Gerald Horne is Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He specializes in the intersection of race, class, and power, with a focus on anti-colonialism and imperialism. Cornel West calls him “one of the great historians of our time.” He is the recipient of the American Book Award and the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. A prolific author, among his many books are Confronting Black Jacobins and The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism.

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For the first time since the Great Depression, most Americans do not believe that their children will be better off than they are. Jesse Jackson thinks the country’s slide can be halted and reversed. In this inspiring presentation, he offers a program of new priorities that he contends will realize greater economic and social justice.

Recorded at the Kennedy School at Harvard.

Speaker: Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson was a giant of the civil rights movement, an icon of the struggle for justice and equality. He worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. An ordained minister his charismatic speaking style enthralled audiences. He was twice a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was the founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. He proudly proclaimed, “My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disrespected and the despised.” In his long life of activism, he kept hope alive. Reverend Jackson passed away on February 17, 2026 at the age of 84.

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The challenges humankind faces from the climate emergency to species extinction to terminal war may be difficult to comprehend, but we ignore them at our peril. Looking away is a lot easier than facing reality. Viewing the Earth as a giant shopping mall to be exploited is leading us to a literal dead end. The capitalist system solely cares about making money. Can a deep caring for the Earth emerge that is nourishing and sustaining rather than recklessly exploiting it? What creative steps can we undertake to reverse the dangerous course we are on? The clock is ticking as our precious planet takes one hit after another. Can global society wake up to implement policies that will avert catastrophe? If not, Joanna Macy says, “It’s curtains.”

Speaker: Joanna Macy

Joanna Macy was a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. Her lectures and writing on Work that Reconnects provided a visionary force in environmental and spiritual activism for over five decades. She is the author of A Wild Love for the World and, with Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience & Creative Power. Joanna Macy passed away in 2025.

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The Lost Cause is rooted in the South’s search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, the South created an image of the war as a noble epic fought by brave men. The war, the mythology goes, wasn’t about preserving slavery; it was about Southern values. Monuments to Confederate soldiers and the naming of military bases not only glorify militarism but are everyday reminders of white supremacy and the subordination of slaves. Slavery, free labor for centuries, created huge wealth for the plantation master class. To heal and repair, we need an honest accounting of history. Some monuments have come down, and military bases may be renamed. We can’t continue to mythologize the past.

Speaker: Jeffery Robinson

Jeffery Robinson, a civil rights attorney, is the executive director of the Who We Are Project. Before that, he was an ACLU deputy legal director and the director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality. He was featured in the documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America.

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Discussions about democracy probably started in Athens about 2500 years ago. A truism is that society is democratic to the extent that its citizens play a meaningful role in managing public affairs. Democracy is located within the capitalist economic system, infamous for producing colossal inequality. There’s no level playing field, as great income and wealth translate into political power for the haves at the expense of the have-nots. We have procedural democracy: elections, broadcast debates, primaries, etc. Citizens are largely marginalized, overwhelmed by big money and powerful lobbies. Look at the widespread demand to ban assault weapons of war, for universal single-payer health care, to protect the environment, and for affordable housing. People want those things but elites have a simple message. Vote. Then go home and leave everything to us. Actual democracy is hollowed out. A Davos-type class rules.

Recorded at the University of Colorado.

Speaker: Michael Parenti

Michael Parenti was a leading independent political analyst, scholar, and author. Cornel West called him “a towering prophetic voice.” He taught at major colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of numerous books, including Democracy for the Few, Power and the Powerless, and Against Empire. He passed away on January 24, 2026 at the age of 92.

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Israel claims that there is no need for explanations as to why Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023. Historian Ilan Pappé challenges that point of view. He says that without historical contextualization, the issues are not only incomprehensible but also make people vulnerable to half-truths and propaganda. For decades, corporate media coverage of the conflict has been lopsided in Israel’s favor. Israelis are humanized. Palestinians are demonized. Pappé points out that the Israel–Palestine conflict didn’t start on October 7th. Nor did it start with the 1917 Balfour Declaration or with 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, or in 1948, when the state of Israel was declared. The roots of the conflict began in 1882, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine.

Speaker: Ilan Pappé

Ilan Pappé has been called “Israel’s bravest historian.” He taught at the University of Haifa and was chair of the Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa. Currently, he is a professor of history at the University of Exeter in England. He is the author of many books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Gaza in Crisis, On Palestine with Noam Chomsky, Lobbying for Zionism, Ten Myths About Israel, Israel On the Brink, and A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s charismatic “I Have a Dream” speech is emblazoned in our historical memories. But another address to a much smaller audience on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York is no less significant. There King demonstrated his deep understanding of how the system works. He moved beyond a simple race analysis to include class and foreign policy issues. He forcefully denounced the war in Vietnam. He called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and he deplored the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.” Exactly one year later King was assassinated in Memphis where he had gone in solidarity with striking sanitation workers.

Speaker: Martin Luther King

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Peace Prize winner, is one of the 20th century’s most enduring figures. He advocated and practiced civil disobedience and non-violence. He said, “Christ gave us the goals and Mahatma Gandhi the tactics.” He rose to national prominence during the epic Montgomery bus boycott and then went on to spearhead a movement which ended juridical apartheid in the U.S. He was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

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We hear from many quarters that “AI will destroy the world,” but everyone’s got a different scenario for what that means. The most sensational perspectives come from theorists like Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of AI” or industrialists like Elon Musk. They warn us that one day, a superintelligent AI could replace human beings in controlling the planet. But we don’t need to conjecture into the future. The scorched-earth destruction is already happening now. Jobs are hemorrhaging with no sign of return; data centers are turning U.S. farmlands into barren industrial gulags while consuming record levels of power, spewing volumes of carbon and using up our last freshwater sources; fusillades of deep-fake videos politically paralyze the public; an AI surveillance infrastructure is being constructed that will lock in fascism; and algorithms are telling ICE and the IDF who lives and who dies. It seems all too overwhelming. However, by tracing AI’s lineage to the development of the atom bomb — with the same ideologies and twisted logic — it becomes apparent that solutions to the AI dilemma can also be found in nuclear history, in its disarmament successes.

Speaker: Koohan Paik-Mander

Koohan Paik-Mander is a journalist, author and peace and environmental activist. She is a co-founder of the Tech Critics Network and serves on the board of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. Her articles appear in The Nation, The Progressive, Foreign Policy in Focus, and other publications. Her article “Whales Will Save the World’s Climate — Unless the Military Destroys Them First” was named by Project Censored as one of the top 25 censored stories of 2021-2022. She is co-author of The Superferry Chronicles: Hawaii’s Uprising Against Militarism, Commercialism and the Desecration of the Earth.

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In a time when scoundrels abound and corruption is rife, the need for resistance is critical. This is no time for fence-sitting and twiddling thumbs. Throughout history, people have fought and defeated autocracy by organizing with allies to challenge, disrupt, and roll back unfair rule. We are in such a moment now, as power is being centralized and the rule of law and decency are being undermined. The odds may seem too difficult, but perseverance and collective action can be effective. Through resistance, authoritarian rule can be rolled back. Historian Howard Zinn reminds us,” The power of tyranny is overestimated and can be overcome by the unity and the determination of apparently powerless people.”

Speaker: John Shattuck

John Shattuck is President Emeritus of the Central European University and Professor of the Practice in Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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Genocide is the most heinous of crimes and it connects to settler colonialism. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz says, “Settler colonialism requires genocidal violence to attain its goal” of acquiring land. In North America and elsewhere this meant the Indigenous population was targeted for mass murder. North America’s huge landmass and resources drove the policy. In Germany, there was the Nazi desire for lebensraum, living space, in Eastern Europe. It’s interesting to see the parallels. The U.S. General William Sherman said in 1873, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” Seventy years later in 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the notorious SS commander, said, “I want to mention a very difficult subject with complete candor. I am talking about the extermination of the Jewish people.”

Recorded at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. A distinguished scholar, she has been active in the international Indigenous movement for many years and is known for her commitment to social justice issues. She is the recipient of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first UN conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas. She is the author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, winner of the 2015 American Book Award, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, All the Real Indians Died Off and 20 Other Myths about Native Americans and Not a Nation of Immigrants.

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