Rising Up With Sonali

FEATURING LYNN HUA - Our nation and our world are overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, you’ll hear conversations with changemakers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week on Rising Up for Justice, my guest is Lynn Hứa, Director of Digital-Distributed Organizing at Organized Power In Numbers, an organization based in the South and Southwest United States. 

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FEATURING SAQIB BHATTI - Our nation and our world are overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, you’ll hear conversations with changemakers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week on Rising Up for Justice, Saqib Bhatti joins us. He is the co-Founder and executive director of ACRE, the Action Center on Race & the Economy and the Bargaining for the Common Good Network. He works on campaigns to win racial and economic justice by taking on the corporations responsible for extracting wealth and resources from communities of color and poor people.

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FEATURING DR. MARA EINSTEIN - President Donald Trump has responded to the growing discontent around out-of-control AI technology by claiming no regulations are needed because he’s such a “smart” “high IQ” president. 

He added, “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” which is a blatant, easily-refuted lie. Even top executives of AI companies can see the writing on the wall. Days after Jacob Coxson, an AI researcher quit his job at Anthropic, warning that the technology has the power and potential to destroy humanity, tech executives called for a slow down of their own product development. 

Dr. Mara Einstein is an internationally recognized expert on deceptive marketing. She is a former TV and advertising executive and the author of 8 books, including Hoodwinked: How marketers use the same tactics as cults. She also appeared in the Emmy-winning Netflix documentary, Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, which exposes the impact of overconsumption on people and the planet. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how people can educate themselves about AI and how it's not hard to design regulations.

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FEATURING ROBIN D. G. KELLEY - On September 15, 2026, my new book Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism was published by Seven Stories Press, a collection of nearly 20 transcripts of interviews with people who have been guests on this very program focused on the powerful resistance that emerged against Trump’s ICE machine in 2025 and the early part of 2026.

Breaking ICE has a foreword by Roberto Lovato and features such activists as Pablo Alvarado, Ron Gochez, Richard Wallace, and Christine Neumann-Ortiz, and academics and storytellers such as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Josefina Lopez, Luis Rodriguez.

Among them is historian and political analyst Robin D. G. Kelley, distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has written several books including his seminal 2003 book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. With his finger on the pulse of contemporary social justice movements, including global struggles for liberation, Kelley offered a sharp analysis of the federal assault on US cities and the resulting resistance during a conversation we had in February 2026.

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Download: mp3 (Duration: 36:24)

GUEST: Robin D. G. Kelley, distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

FEATURING ETENG ETTAH - Our nation and our world are overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, you’ll hear conversations with changemakers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week on Rising Up for Justice, we’ll turn to Eteng Ettah, the Narrative and Communications Director at MediaJustice, a national organization that builds power to challenge how corporations and governments use media and technology to shape our collective future. 

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FEATURING MOHAMMAD TAJFAR - In the weeks and months following the devastating Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, dozens of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras operated and run by a little-known company called Flock, were installed in burned out neighborhoods, apparently to tackle looting. The company apparently donated the cameras.

Just over a year later, a majority of Altadena residents oppose the use of such technology, in line with mass public opposition across the country where Flock cameras are now widely deployed. 

Mohammad Tajsar is the Director of Immigrants’ Rights at the ACLU of Southern California, where he works to advance the rights and dignity of immigrants and immigrants’ rights activists. He also works to protect individuals’ digital rights against government surveillance and corporate misconduct. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about ALPR cameras in Altadena.

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FEATURING CHRISTOPHER W SHAW - President Donald Trump on Sunday appealed to Supreme Court justices to block a federal judge’s decision against his mail-in-voting restrictions. In spite of the fact that nearly one-third of all voters use mail-in ballots, and that state governments have final authority over election implementation, the Trump administration has demanded control. It has done so by blatantly lying about widespread voter fraud. And, it has used the one tool the federal government has control of: The US Postal Service. 

An anonymous USPS whistle blower has filed a report warning of a high risk of “catastrophic failure” of the midterm elections if the White House’s plan were to be implemented. Christopher W. Shaw is the author of the book First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the Trump war on voting.

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FEATURING SAVIO CARVALHO - Thousands of people in Nepal observed a national day of mourning on Monday to mark the devastation of climate-change-fueled floods that killed more than 1,200 people including a few dozen in neighboring Tibet. More than 5,000 remain missing.

How and why did it happen? According to Grist, “Seven billion cubic feet of glacial ice and rock, enough to fill 100 football stadiums, crashed roughly a mile straight down into the river below. The impact created a muddy wall of water that swept through the valley as fast as 100 miles per hour.”

Nearly three years earlier, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres visited the melting glaciers of Nepal and warned that “The rooftops of the world are caving in.”

And just days after Nepal’s disaster struck, the UN Environment Programme published a report claiming that global temperatures had already pushed past the 1.5 degree Celsius limit and that it was time to focus on mitigation and adaptation to an unstable and deadly climate for decades while working to bring global temperatures back down. It was a grim assessment, one that my guest will help make sense of.

Savio Carvalho is Managing Director of Campaigns and Networks at 350.org, overseeing the country and global teams driving campaigns to end fossil fuels and advance a just renewable energy transition.  Originally from India and based in the Netherlands, he has worked for over two decades across Asia, Africa and Europe with organisations including Amnesty International, Greenpeace International, WaterAid and Oxfam, on issues spanning climate, food systems, water and sanitation, gender and humanitarian response. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the Nepal floods and UNEP report.

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Listen to story:

Download: mp3 (Duration: 26:27)

FEATURING ERIC NAING - Our nation and our world are overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, you’ll hear conversations with changemakers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week on Rising Up for Justice, I’m joined by Eric Naing, communications director for Demand Progress, an organization that works to secure progressive policy change by fighting corporate power and holding government accountable to the people.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's get into what Demand Progress is. I gave a very brief one-sentence description, but what are the goals of Demand Progress? What are the main avenues that you work on? 

Eric Naing: I would say that the main avenues that we work on are issues of concentrated corporate power, war, privacy, democracy, and an open internet. And very just broadly and simply, our goal is to see a future where people, and not the corporate interests or establishment elites, are the ones who hold power. And we do that by marshaling the one million affiliated activists we have and also our lobbying work to secure progressive policy changes that improve lives for everyday people. 

So that's a lot of very broad aspects of our lives, government overreach, corporate abuses, that covers most of what we deal with as a society. Let's go into the founding of Demand Progress, specifically because it seems as if it started out more as an organization around internet freedom. 

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