This is not an error! Because of the recent release of the Epstein files I felt sharing my true crime show Highway to Hells 2 part series on Jeffrey Epstein would be valuable bonus for people.

If you are a true crime and travel fan please subscribe and listen to Highway to Hell wherever you get your podcasts. Part 2 comes out next Tuesday on Highway to Hell.

**Please forgive some slight quality changes as this had to be recorded remotely*

3 million more Epstein files were released and yet in the US there has been no further investigation, no arrests. Files that detail the rape, murder, cannibalism of children result in no arrests.

The release of the files almost extend Epsteins story- a man of deception, greed and who skated through his life with absolutely no accountability. The middle class Jewish boy, born into an average Brooklyn jewish family but who called himself "poor, smart, and desperate to be rich". Desperate for the elite and the luxury of New York, and then the world.

A man, who with no college degree who was hired to teach at the elite Dalton school anyway because of his proficiency at math. He was inappropriate with teenage girls but removed quietly- no accountability, no embarrassment for the school. But a parent who met him there brought him into Bear Sterns, with no degree, no qualifications, and when his deceit ran out, he was released quietly. Epstein then shaped himself as the financial advisor of the elite of the elite. He only needed one client, and he found it in Leslie Wexner who gave Epstein all of the keys to his kingdom. When Epstein misappropriated funds, basically gave himself a New York mansion, they settled quietly out of court- no accountability, no embarrassment.

If any single person had exposed Epstein for who he was, the files likely wouldn't exist. And when he finally did get caught for abusing minors, the district attorney and FBI cut him the sweetheart deal of a lifetime. 12 hours a day in jail for 13 months, getting to work in his private office, privacy and a non prosecutorial agreement for all his friends who participated in trafficking and raping minors. They went so far as to lie to his victims about it.

No accountability. No embarrassment. Boys will be boys after all.

FULL LIST OF SOURCES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

[email protected]

Metro Surge in Minneapolis brought with it horror and conflict. Civilians and US citizens were killed, migrants were abducted without warrants, legal observers were tear gassed, people were held in extended detainment without help. Federal officers murdered without investigations, the DOJ and DHS broke federal law without any recourse and it left people wondering "what can I legally do?". It's also become progressively more important to understand how our immigration system works in the US, how its flawed and what all of our rights are.

Daphne Delvaux, is a former immigration attorney and now educator who helps people know their rights and understand how the system works. She is also an immigrant herself and shares her story of going through the system in the US, one that denied her the first time because she and her husband chose not to mix finances. Here she tells her story, teaches us about our rights and gives us some hope and gentle mothering towards the end. Something I desperately needed.

Today we explore the radicalization of young men. How do authoritarian movements especially capitalize on men and bend them to their will?
How does a kind, average boy grow up to be ordered to kill and say "I was just following orders"? Why do particularly conservative men buckle so quickly under perceived "more masculine" authority?
The reality is that there are a lot of reasons. And they are the same reasons that men are living in a system that makes them feel lonely, invisible, unable to access emotions, and kills them young.
Today we explore patriarchal systems, how the narrowing of masculinity rips humanity out of the hands of men. And how movements like the Nazis were able to weaponize disenfranchised, disappointed, and angry men and transform them into weapons of genocide.

Sources:

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins, 1992.

Browning, Christopher R. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. W. W. Norton, 2010.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. Myth of the German Comradeship: The Wehrmacht and the Politics of Memory. Cambridge University Press.

Welzer, Harald. Perpetrators: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Bloxham, Donald. Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. Oxford University Press.

Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Harvard University Press, 2003.

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Neitzel, Sönke, and Harald Welzer. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. (Based on secretly recorded conversations of German POWs)

Biddiscombe, Perry. The SS Hunter Battalions: The Hidden History of the Nazi Resistance Movement 1944–45. Tempus.

Biddiscombe, Perry. Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946. University of Toronto Press.

Lower, Wendy. Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Heinemann, Isabel. “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas. Wallstein Verlag.

Bartov, Omer. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Bartov, Omer. The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare. Palgrave.

Fritz, Stephen G. Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II. University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

Manstein, Erich von. Lost Victories. Zenith Press.
(Primary source memoir; ideological but useful for studying mindset)

Himmler, Heinrich. Posen Speeches (1943). Primary documents; available in English translation via Holocaust Research Project / Nizkor / German Federal Archives.

Yad Vashem Archives. Testimonies of perpetrators and victims, Einsatzgruppen records, postwar interrogation files.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books, 1986.

Staub, Ervin. The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. Cambridge University Press.

Bandura, Albert. Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live With Themselves. Worth Publishers, 2015.
(Not Nazi-specific but foundational for understanding perpetrator psychology)

Kelman, Herbert. “Violence Without Moral Restraint.” Journal of Social Issues.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin, 1963.

Rees, Laurence. The Nazis: A Warning from History. New Press, 1997.

Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz: A New History. PublicAffairs, 2005.

Haffner, Sebastian. Defying Hitler: A Memoir. Picador, 2003.

Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Crown, 2015.Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010.

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Subscribe for 40% off their vantage plan at groundnews.com/tables

When I scheduled this talk with Odessa, one of Nashvilles staunchest activists, I had no idea what was about to unfold in Minneapolis with the shooting of Alex Pretti just 5 days after we recorded this session. I think this conversation could not have landed on a more relevant time if I had tried.

Odessa Kelly is a Nashville native, organizer, and political activist focused on racial, economic, and social justice. She was born and raised on the East Side of Nashville in a working-class community facing poverty, substance abuse, and gun violence. Kelly graduated from Tennessee State University with a degree in Business Administration and later earned a Master’s in Public Service from Cumberland University.

She spent nearly 14 years working as a civil servant for Metro Nashville’s Parks & Recreation Department, including leading the Napier Community Center, where she worked directly with youth and families. Witnessing systemic inequities and the impact of policy decisions on her community pushed her toward broader community organizing work.

In 2016, Kelly co-founded Stand Up Nashville, a grassroots advocacy organization dedicated to fighting for economic equity, affordable housing, workers’ rights, and community benefits from local development. Under her leadership, the group won Nashville’s first community benefits agreement with a major soccer stadium project, securing commitments on living wages, affordable housing, and childcare supports.

Kelly has been honored with several awards, including the National Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Award, a National Courage Award, and Nashville Scenes Activist of the Year for her work advancing justice for working people and marginalized communities.

As a mother of two and a member of Mount Zion Baptist Church, she has also run for public office. In 2022, Kelly was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, campaigning on expanding economic opportunity, housing justice, and representation for working families.

Her activism and platform emphasize lived experience, community empowerment, and challenging systems that leave working-class people behind. And now she meets with us to tell us how to carry that legacy forward.

I apologize this is late everyone, as you know this has been a really busy and tough weekend in the reporting/political realm.

So excited for this conversation with a dear friend of mine, and one of my favorite voices in town. Kyndle Wylde is a Memphis born soul, blues and rock singer. You might recognize her as the winner of the 2024 CBS morning mixtape competition with a delicious soul version of "I Can See Clearly Now". She now performs and tours with Post Modern Jukebox and her cover of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" with them has over 1.6 million views. She also released her debut, self titled EP in 2025.

But what you might not know, is that she was born and raised in a small Tennessee town. She was part of the family worship band in her grandfathers church and she had a long road of self discovery to find that not only she could be an artist but she wanted to. She shares the moment the church told her "walk the Damascus Road" and when she didn't, found the support system pulled out from her.
But it turns out love, a dream, and slow unsteady steps to self discovery- can change your world.

This episode is brought to you by ground news. Subscribe for 40% off their vantage plan at groundnews.com/tables

Viola Fauver Liuzzo was a 39-year-old white civil rights volunteer from Detroit who traveled to Alabama in March 1965 to support the Selma-to-Montgomery marches. On the night of March 25, while driving 19-year-old activist Leroy Moton back toward Selma, she was chased down U.S. Route 80 by a car of Ku Klux Klan members—Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr., William Orville Eaton, Eugene Thomas, and FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe. Wilkins fired a shotgun into Liuzzo’s car, killing her instantly; Moton survived by playing dead. The presence of Rowe, who had a history of participating in Klan violence while on the FBI payroll, sparked major controversy about what federal authorities knew and tolerated.

Alabama first tried Wilkins for murder, but his initial trial ended in a hung jury, and a second all-white jury acquitted him despite Rowe’s eyewitness testimony. After the state failed to secure a conviction, the Department of Justice charged Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas under federal civil-rights law (18 U.S.C. § 241) for conspiring to deprive Liuzzo of her civil rights. All three were convicted and received ten-year sentences, marking one of the earliest successful federal civil-rights prosecutions against white supremacist violence. In the aftermath, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover orchestrated a smear campaign against Liuzzo—spreading false claims about her character to deflect criticism of the FBI’s role in managing informants. Her murder and the federal response helped galvanize support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later fueled congressional scrutiny of FBI conduct during the Church Committee investigations.

Sources:

James P. Turner, Selma and the Liuzzo Murder Trials: The First Modern Civil Rights Convictions.
Mary Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo.
Gary May, Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy.
Wayne Greenhaw, Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963.
Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.
Peter B. Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s.
U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee Reports).
FBI COINTELPRO Files (Declassified).
U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division Archives on the Liuzzo Case.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, The FBI and the Civil Rights Movement (archival materials).
NAACP Records and Papers on Selma and Voting Rights.
Civil Rights Documentation Project, Library of Congress.
Eyes on the Prize (PBS Documentary Series)
Home of the Brave (Documentary on Viola Liuzzo).
National Civil Rights Museum, Viola Liuzzo Exhibits.
Southern Poverty Law Center Archives on Ku Klux Klan Activity.
John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.
Lerone Bennett Jr., “Selma: The Road to Freedom,” Ebony Magazine Archives.
Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.
Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr..
Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (context on FBI surveillance).
Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000.
David Carter, The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement (on federal infiltration of civil rights groups).
United States v. Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas (Federal §241 Trial Records).

Prepare to get angry.

I unfortunately fell back into the bad habit of doom scrolling. And it was so discouraging to watch what happens online. The increased amount of abuse towards women, calling for them to not be able to vote, taking away resources for single parents (because sure, lets punish the parent who stayed), and the double standard of women's sexuality has been gut wrenching for me.
Christmas Eve I read a book called "Witchcraft for Wayward Girls" by Grady Hendrix. I read it in one day. Now while its fiction, its factually based on what happened in homes for unwed mothers in the US- a grandchild of the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland. This double standard is so ingrained, so enmeshed in our culture and society and since the Dobbs decision, those homes - where so much abuse, fraud (gasp), coercion and trafficking happened, are now increasing in number.
Women will never be free and equal if we acquiesce, if we cave, if we allow it, if we carry shame that was never ours to begin with. We shatter those standards by first learning about them and what they have done to the women before us.

1803 Offences Against the Person Act (Lord Ellenborough’s Act)

1828 Offences Against the Person Act

• 1837 Offences Against the Person Act

• 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, Sections 58–59

• Infant Life Preservation Act 1929

• Abortion Act 1967 (UK)

• Lane Committee Report, Report of the Committee on the Working of the Abortion Act (1974)

• Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) historical ethics reports

• Brookes, Barbara. Abortion in England, 1900–1967. Croom Helm.

• Fisher, Kate. Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918–1960. Oxford University Press.

• McLaren, Angus. A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Blackwell.

• Williams, Glanville. The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law.

• Irish Department of Justice. The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (McAleese Report), 2013.

• O’Sullivan, M. The Irish Magdalene Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. Manchester University Press.

• Smith, James M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. University of Notre Dame Press.

• Finnegan, Frances. Do Penance or Perish: A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland. Oxford University Press.

• Luddy, Maria. Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940. Cambridge University Press.

• Raftery, Mary & O’Sullivan, Eoin. Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools.

• BBC Panorama investigative reporting on the Laundries

• Irish Times archives (historical reporting on Magdalene institutions)

• UN Committee on the Rights of the Child briefs on Irish institutional abuses

• Joint Oireachtas Committee hearings on institutional abuse

• Solinger, Rickie. Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade. Routledge.

• Fessler, Ann. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. Penguin.

• Kunzel, Regina. Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. Yale University Press.

• National Florence Crittenton Mission Archives

• Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, early 20th-century records on “unmarried mothers”

• Maza, Sarah. Work on U.S. adoption coercion practices

• Original court records from state maternity homes (various—primarily Minnesota, Tennessee, New York)

• Liberty Godparent Home archives, Liberty University (reporting, survivor testimony, investigative journalism)

• Liberty Lost podcast and transcripts (primary oral history from survivors)

• Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute reports

• New York Times investigative reports (1950s–1990s) on maternity homes and adoption coercion

• Senate Subcommittee hearings on adoption abuses (1970s–1980s)

• Social Security Bulletin archives on “Aid to Dependent Children” (ADC) and out-of-wedlock births

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What does real, REAL resistance look like?

Tad Stoermer is a public historian, teacher, and author of the forthcoming book A Resistance History of the United States releasing June of 2026.

His work dismantles the mythologies that pass for American history. He removes the curated nostalgia, moral evasions, and institutional silences that have long protected abusive power. That continue to protect that abusive power.

From his website:

"A Resistance History of the United States is a record of repeated fights against abusive authority, carried out by people who refused the lies used to justify it. Those battles have taken different forms: the women and men in Salem who would not confess to witchcraft, the Black Loyalists who seized their own freedom during the Revolution, and the Anti-Federalists who forced a Bill of Rights to limit nationalist power. It’s a tradition carried forward by people like Ona Judge and Henry David Thoreau, by the clandestine networks of the Underground Railroad, and by the violent resolve of John Brown and the Secret Six—resistance so disruptive it helped push the nation into civil war, and so ambitious it took the focus and will of the Radical Republicans to begin building a new republic from the ruins. A Resistance History of the United States uncovers these moments not as steps toward inevitable progress, but as a set of hard-earned lessons—a usable playbook for confronting the abuse of power in our own time.

ad is one of the most widely followed public historians in the world here today to help us face what is to come.

He is a currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern Denmark’s Center for American Studies and a Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He previously taught public history at Harvard, served as a public historian at Colonial Williamsburg, and was advisor for history content at C-SPAN.

Happy almost New Years Eve!!! Here on Flipping Tables we are going to end each year with an inspirational story. So here's one of my heroes.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident whose life continues to challenge how faith responds to power, violence, and injustice. Raised in an intellectually rigorous, non-religious household, Bonhoeffer came to believe that Christianity was not merely a system of beliefs, but a call to costly, lived obedience—especially when moral clarity comes at personal risk.

As Adolf Hitler rose to power, Bonhoeffer warned early that the church faced a defining test. When Christianity was fused with nationalism and racial ideology, he argued, the church had ceased to be the church. He became a key figure in the Confessing Church, opposing the Nazification of German Christianity and rejecting loyalty oaths to the Führer. His theological writings during this period—including reflections on “cheap grace” versus “costly grace”—confronted complacent faith that avoids sacrifice.

Eventually drawn into resistance circles connected to the German military intelligence service, Bonhoeffer wrestled deeply with ethical responsibility in a world where evil left no clean choices. Arrested in 1943, he continued writing from prison, leaving behind letters and reflections that would later shape modern Christian ethics and political theology. Executed by the Nazis in April 1945, just weeks before the war’s end, Bonhoeffer’s life stands as a haunting reminder: faith that refuses to act in the face of injustice is no faith at all.

Sources:

Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Fortress Press.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Act and Being. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 2. Fortress Press.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Fortress Press.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Sanctorum Communio. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 1. Fortress Press.
Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives).
Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) – Bonhoeffer family records.
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education), Germany.
Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. John W. de Gruchy, ed.
Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and the Great War. Cambridge University Press.
Christian History Institute. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Timeline & Biography.”
Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Harper.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (DBWE), English Edition, Vols. 1–3. Fortress Press.
Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin.
Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich at War. Penguin.
Fischer, Fritz. Germany’s Aims in the First World War. W. W. Norton.
Fulbrook, Mary. A History of Germany 1918–2014. Wiley-Blackwell.
German Reichstag Records, 1918–1923.
Green, Clifford J. Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality. Eerdmans.
Herwig, Holger H. The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary. Arnold.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire: 1875–1914. Vintage.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin.
Keegan, John. The First World War. Vintage.
Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Harcourt.
MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. Random House.
Marks, Sally. The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918–1933. Palgrave.
Marsh, Charles. Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Knopf.
Metaxas, Eric. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Thomas Nelson.
National Archives (UK). World War I diplomatic records.
Overy, Richard. The Dictators. W. W. Norton.
PBS. Bonhoeffer Timeline.
Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic. Hill and Wang.
Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. Basic Books.
Strachan, Hew. The First World War. Oxford University Press.
Treaty of Versailles (1919), full text.
Union Theological Seminary Archives – Bonhoeffer Papers.

2025 has been a year of difficult conversations. It's been a year of angst, anger, and frustrating conversations. How do we continue to talk about the hard things, especially when we don't know how to get through to the other person?

You've seen Anna Connelly online with her cheeky conversations with her "conservative cousin" talking about history, immigration, politics, government. She uses these disarming conversations to help prep people to hear an opposing perspective and to arm people to have these conversations themselves. (If you're home now and trying to figure out how to talk to family, maybe open your phone and watch a few).

Anna shows us how to continue to show up with humanity, humor and humility. And she's brilliant at it.

These conversations are needed now more than ever and all of us have the power to have them.