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FEATURING TAMAR SARAI - On November 4, 2025, the small New England town of Somerville, Massachusetts became the first in the nation to pass a ballot measure instructing local authorities to divest from Israel. The vote, labeled “Question 3” passed with 56% support. Weeks later, the Somerville City Council followed through with the voter demand and passed a resolution to follow through on the process of divestment. 

How did Somerville do it and how can other cities follow suit?

Tamar Sarai is a Philadelphia based journalist. She is currently a contributing writer at Prism as well as a History PhD student at Temple University and wrote about Somerville's Question 3 fight. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the story.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So let's talk about Somerville's, small little town, but very liberal. And although it sounds like something that might be seen as not terribly surprising, as you point out in your story on Prism, the issue of Question 3 was not without challenges. How did it start? I understand it was just two short years ago that a single individual was able to begin mobilizing and helped form a broad-based coalition to make this question and ballot measure possible?

Tamar Sarai: Yes, yes. So, the organization behind the ballot question is called Somerville for Palestine. And it's a group of local organizers, community members that came together at the end of 2023, and they were really committed to having their city council pass a ceasefire resolution. And so they successfully advocated for that ceasefire resolution, and it passed in January of 2024, making Somerville actually the first city in Massachusetts to put to pass their own ceasefire resolution. 

So, that was a big win for Somerville for Palestine especially given the fact that the coalition was so new. And from there, they really wanted to make sure that Somerville was a part of the BDS movement. So, “boycott, divest, sanction,” and that started with organizers just following the money and doing a lot of in-depth research. 

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FEATURING UNAI MONTES-IRUESTE - Our nation and our world is 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, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, Unai Montes-Irueste, the Media Strategy Director for People's Action and People's Action Institute joins us. Prior to taking on this role, Unai consulted for /ˈmantrə/, (a.k.a. mantra strategy group) a public affairs firm he co-founded. He also served as Narrative and Strategic Communications Director for Housing California, and many other roles.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: People’s Action is an organization that many might have heard of. I understand it’s a coalition of groups around the country and in many, many different states. It's been around for 50 years. And from what I gather, it is focused on issue-based fights, particularly through the electoral process, but not necessarily exclusively. Is that relatively accurate? How, how do you describe People’s Action? 

Unai Montes-Irueste: Yeah, Of course. Well, thank you again. yeah, People’s Action and our sister organization, our C-4 Sister People’s Action Institute are national networks. And those networks consist of what we like to call power building groups or grassroots affiliates. And so, we're basically starting where folks are in more than 80 organizations all across the country. And in those communities, folks are identifying the issues that matter most to them. And what of course we've seen, as you've indicated in your introduction, is that there are some common threads throughout. 

A lot of challenges with affordability, a lot of challenges with healthcare, a lot of challenges with climate justice and housing. And those things have helped build out robust issue campaigns and those robust issue campaigns live through local organizing and then also national organizing. 

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Support a program that gives voice to incarcerated people like Dortell Williams and lifts up abolitionist ideals!

FEATURING DORTELL WILLIAMS - Crime, we know, is linked to wealth inequality. But it’s also built on social fracturing. Our special correspondent Dortell Williams has thought long and hard about the roots of public safety, how to preserve and strengthen it, and says that mentorship is a powerful, and underrated mode of human connection that can prevent crimes. 

Dortell Williams, incarcerated individual at Mule Creek State Prison, serving a sentence of life without parole, currently seeking his freedom at www.FreeDortellWilliams.com. Dortell is a regular correspondent on Rising Up With Sonali. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about mentorship, his experience with it, and why it works.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: One of the things that takes up your attention is how folks who are, whether they're incarcerated or not incarcerated, can benefit from mentorship. It's something that I've thought about over the years as someone who's, you know, had younger people I've mentored, but after having gotten to know you and some of the work that you do, it seems as though mentorship, especially within prison walls, can be life-changing and even life-saving. Would you say that? 

Dortell Williams: Oh, absolutely. And I, think my idea of mentorship is to have mentorship before we end up going to prison. Because so many of us, I mean, when you think about it, most of the kids who go astray are misguided. They've been misguided sometimes by their own parents. I'm one of them. I love my dad. My dad was, you know, as good as he could be at the time, but unfortunately, you know, he had his own traumas, and so he misguided me into criminality and, you know, those types of things. 

And, just like so many of the other youth out there, you know, we needed intervention. A real robust policy of intervention is the best way to tackle crime and to approach public policy, you know, for obvious reasons. 

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Support a program that never censors the truth of Palestine and Israel, while upholding the lives and dignity of Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and Jewish people.

FEATURING MARIANNE DHENIN - In October 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 715 into law, a troubling piece of legislation aimed at public education in the state, primarily around criticism of Israel. 

The bill’s opponents say it is vague, rife with potential for abuse, and clearly violates the First Amendment of teachers and students. A growing coalition of educators and activists are hoping to beat it back. 

Marianne Dhenin is an award-winning journalist and historian whose recent story is called A Growing Coalition is Fighting Censorship in California’s Public Schools. Marianne spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the story recently.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: This story is so interesting because one of the, I think, less-reported aspects of it that you really lift up in your piece is how there's this unholy alliance, or maybe even just such an overlap, between those people who have gone after anti-Israel criticism and those people who have attacked ethnic studies in public schools in California. The pro-Israel crowd meets the MAGA crowd, and of course, many of them are one in the same. So tell me about AB 715 , how it is that this intersection of people who attack ethnic studies and criticism of Israel came together to pass this bill. 

Marianne Dhenin: AB 715 comes after a couple of years of efforts in California's legislature. A series of bills have been introduced over the past couple of years since California enshrined an ethnic studies graduation requirement into law back in 2021 with AB101. AB 715 is the first in a series of bills that have attacked ethnic studies education in California to pass and to be signed into law. 

Several of these have come out of California's legislative Jewish caucus, which is a group of democratic lawmakers, but pro-Israel lawmakers. 

Not everyone in the caucus is Jewish, and the caucus doesn't represent the diversity of California's Jewish communities according to the sources that I spoke with, which include organizers with Jewish voice for peace. So, after a couple of years of efforts, AB 715 has passed. 

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Support a program that isn't afraid to cover stories corporate media won't!

FEATURING ANDY LEE ROTH - As Netflix and Paramount make aggressive bids to buy Warner Bros, our increasingly consolidated media ecosphere, controlled by billionaires and serving their agendas, distorts, under-covers, or even censors major news stories entirely. It’s a long trend that’s getting worse, and is the reason why Project Censored, now in its 50th year, continues to publish the most censored news stories of the year. 

Andy Lee Roth is editor-at-large for Project Censored and its publishing imprint, The Censored Press. He is co-editor of Project’s State of the Free Press 2026 and a coauthor of The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about some of the year's most censored stories.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, as I mentioned, we are seeing greater media consolidation. I figure, eventually, maybe in our lifetimes, there'll be one great company controlling it all, and of course that limitation of who's in charge limits the stories as well. Tell me, just for those who aren't familiar with Project Censored, what is this State of the Free Press book that comes out at the end of every year, and why is it put together? 

Andy Lee Roth: Yeah. Well, the project exists to hold the corporate media accountable when they fail to provide us the kind of news and information that we need to be informed and engaged in our communities as citizens, as global citizens. And also, to celebrate the important work of independent journalists who bring us those stories and independent news outlets who have the courage to support research on, and publish those stories. So, a kind of a cornerstone of the yearbook every year is our report on the year's most important, but under reported stories. And that's something the project has been doing for 50 years now. 

This is the 50th cohort of undergraduate students working with Project Censored at colleges and universities across the country, starting at Sonoma State University in California. Students working with their faculty mentors are identifying these important but potentially undercovered stories and then researching them to see, have they indeed been left unaddressed by corporate media, or addressed, but in partial terms in both senses of that word, partial, either incomplete or also biased?

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FEATURING CHRISTINE NEUMANN-ORTIZ - Our nation and our world is 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, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, founding Executive Director of Voces de la Frontera and Voces de la Frontera Action joins us. She serves on the board of a national coalition of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement and is a national leader in the immigrant rights movement.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: I've spoken to you so many times before on my other show, Rising Up With Sonali. This time we're focusing on your organization rather than all of the scary issues that we usually talk about. Let's talk about Voces itself. 

As I mentioned, it's based in Wisconsin, but you have such a national profile now, you've really made the organization one that is a national contender. we think of the big cities like LA and New York and Chicago as being centers of immigrant rights, organizing, but you've really made Wisconsin stand out. How do you summarize the work that Voces de la Frontera does for our audience, including the main issue and your organizational goals?

Christine Neumann-Ortiz: Well yeah, the reference in Spanish is “Voices from the Border” because even though I live in Wisconsin, I had spent time in Texas at the border there and had an opportunity to travel the border for a year and meet workers from the maquiladora industry that were organizing and a tri national coalition that was, building alliances between Canadian, US and Mexican workers, especially at the time of the Free trade agreement when it was being signed in 1994. 

And, and even then, at that very beginning stage, you could already see, the kinds of abuses that were taking place in terms of exposure to like the environment with and chemical exposure to workers who went unprotected and just, poverty despite people working and working really hard. And so that became, how people were organizing under those conditions. It really became the inspiration when it came back to Wisconsin to form, kind of a worker center model.

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Unwrap the best gift this holiday season: truly independent media that informs and activates us to build a just world.

FEATURING JUDITH ENCK - We are awash in plastics, from the polyester clothing on our backs, to the glasses on our face, the polish on our nails, the packaging of our food, and even the microplastics flowing through our blood. In less than a century, plastic has revolutionized our lives and leaves a legacy that is slowly poisoning us. 

Now, as we enter the thick of holiday season, the plastic consumption is ramping up, from plastic toys and gifts and giftwrap, to plastic-packaged foods and dinner ware and more. 

 Can we free ourselves of plastic? Yes we can, says Judith Enck, founder and president of Beyond Plastics, an organization whose goal is eliminating plastic pollution everywhere. Enck was appointed by President Obama to serve as regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 and served as deputy secretary for the environment in the New York Governor’s Office.

Enck is currently a professor at Bennington College and the author of the new book The Problem With Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how people can take political action, and how you can have a plastic-free holiday this year.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: I think a lot of people understand now that plastic is a problem, but maybe they're not as aware just how deeply embedded it is in our lives and actually, in our bodies itself. I remember the first time I read about microplastics polluting the ocean, you know, from those little tiny beads that some manufacturers decided it would be good to put in things like lotion and soap, to finding out that plastic filaments are in our bloodstream. And it was quite shocking. So how do you explain how that even happens? How does, how does plastic get into our bodies? We just surround ourselves with so much plastic, it's just everywhere now?

Judith Enck: Well, none of us voted for more plastic. the reason we have so much plastic is because there is a glut of fracked gas on the market. Historically, plastics were made from oil and chemicals. Today it's made from 16,000 different chemicals and ethane, which is a byproduct of fracking 'cause there's a glut of frack gas. Fossil fuel companies are using that waste product to produce new plastic products. 

The way plastics get into our bodies is we're either breathing it in or we're swallowing, particularly from food and beverage packaging. And the health consequences are quite significant. 

So, scientific researchers have found the presence of microplastics in our blood, our lungs, our kidney, our heart arteries, where they've seen microplastics attached to plaque. If you've got microplastics on plaque, you have a much greater risk of developing heart disease, stroke, premature death. 

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FEATURING NORMAN SOLOMON - Corporate Democrats pushed progressive alternatives out of the way to promote themselves as alternatives to Trump–and lost–in 2016 and 2024. That’s the assertion central to a new book by Norman Solomon called The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy.

With three long years of Trump’s second term stretching before us, Solomon urges a critical analysis of just how destructive figures like Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and even Barack Obama have been, and why it’s essential to defeat them in order to defeat Trumpism. 

Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Invisible. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about his newlatestbook, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, this book is a very detailed and yet extremely straightforward analysis of how it was that Democrats, particularly the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, paved the way for Trump. Now, that's not something we hear very much, if at all, in the mainstream media, that we blame Democrats for the rise of the top Republican, the most dangerous Republican that we've seen in our lifetime, if not ever. So why, let's talk about… you start the book in the year 2016, and actually you kind of talk about Obama in 2009. Where's the good starting point for that analysis that corporate Democrats are to blame for Trump's rise? 

Norman Solomon: Well, I suppose if we go way back bill Clinton, who sided with big corporations who pushed in NAFTA, who did the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, which opened the floodgates for monopolization of media, increasingly right-wing. 

In terms of the book I do refer to Barack Obama, a hero of many democratic liberals and so-called moderates, where he came into office. There were millions and millions of people with their mortgages underwater with toxic mortgages, and he let them sink and he bailed out Wall Street and the big banks. And so even while Obama sailed into reelection as Bill Clinton had, he left the party leaders and especially elected Democrats to drown. 

And so, if we trace where we are now, I think we can go back to, in many ways, the eight years of Obama, both, abandoning middle class and low-income people, at the same time that he let other Democrats sink or swim, often sink, in terms of the rising inequality anger that people justifiably felt. 

And so, what happened during the decade where Obama was in office, basically, 1,000 Democrats lost their seats in state legislatures around the country. So, the Republicans came in, ran more and more state governments and the legislatures there, and they were able to reapportion and gerrymander. 

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FEATURING DR. JEN JONES - Our nation and our world is 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, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, Dr. Jen Jones, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) joins us. She leads the center’s research, policy, and outreach efforts around science policy, scientific integrity, science of elections, and disinformation.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I really was excited to have Union of Concerned Scientists on, in part because my background is in science and I transitioned to social justice, and also in part because we don't often think, I think of scientific organizations as being deeply interested matters of social justice and matters of humanity. So, for those people who've never heard of what UCS is or does, how do you explain its main goal? 

Dr. Jen Jones: You know, our main goal is to use science for solutions, and those solutions should create a more healthy and just world. So, justice and equity are centered in everything we do. You know, we believe that science should work for the public and it should inform the policies that really protect, the health of people, the health of the planet, you know, from clean air to safe food, to equitable transportation, science should work for people. And as you said in your intro, not just for billionaires. 

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Please support this platform for the ideas of incarcerated people. So few media outlets offer so much for so little.

This story was originally published on August 5, 2025.

FEATURING DORTELL WILLIAMS - The United States prison system is one of the harshest and most punitive in the world, locking up nearly 2 million people. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, “The U.S. locks up more people per capita than any other independent democracy, at the staggering rate of 580 per 100,000 residents.” What is the point of such a high rate of incarceration? 

Rehabilitation, we are told, is the goal, and that imprisoning people who are convicted of crimes, will help them and help society. But does this work? Are there even mechanisms in place to measure if it’s working? Or are we merely locking people up and throwing away the keys?

But, what about those people who are sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole?

Write to California Governor Gavin Newsom to commute Dortell's sentence.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that, “inmates who participate in correctional education programs have 43 percent lower odds of returning to prison than those who do not, and that every dollar spent on prison education saves four to five dollars on the costs of re-incarceration.” But prisons are constantly starving for funds.

Dortell Williams is serving a life sentence without parole at Mule Creek State Prison in California and is a regular correspondent with Rising Up With Sonali. An urgent effort to free him is underway. Find out more at www.FreeDortellWilliams.com.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Welcome back to the program Dortell Williams. 

Dortell Williams: Yeah, good morning. Good morning to you and your audience. I'm glad to be with you. 

Kolhatkar: So, you and I have talked so much about prisons and what they do, what they don't do. We are going to be talking today about rehabilitation, which often is in the words that are used to describe prisons. They're labeled institutions that rehabilitate, in other words, help reform individuals who have been convicted of crimes. 

What does rehabilitation mean in the context of prisons? Like how do prisons actually say they rehabilitate people? 

Williams: Well, you know, it's an elusive word, and I would say for people with life sentences, me included, the board is probably the best measurement of rehabilitation as far as the state's definition of it. And that is to show that you're not a, a present danger to society when they release you. 

And then further than that, just in general, if a person were to get out and stay out for three years without going back to prison, they would consider that rehabilitated. 

Kolhatkar: So for people who don't have access to parole or being able to go before a parole board, what does that mean? I mean, you have a life sentence without the possibility of parole. So how do you, how does someone in your position get treated by the system? 

Williams: Well to be, to be blunt we don't exist. We just, we just don't exist. There's no measurement for us. There's no mechanism for us to be measured to, to go to the board. We're just labeled incorrigible from the moment we're sentenced. And most of us are sentenced as emerging adults. So that means that we're between the ages of 18 and 25, which is generally the ages that people go to prison. But we are we're deemed incorrigible from the beginning, and that's it. So yeah, that's, that's how they would measure that. 

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