Rising Up With Sonali

FEATURING BERNADETTE DEL CHIARO - Gavin Newsom is wrapping up his tenure as California’s governor by signing a spate of bills into law, among them, a much-touted balcony solar bill. At a time when electricity rates are spiking, residents of California will soon be able to plug in solar panels onto their balconies and generate small amounts of power to offset their high utility bills. 

While the new law sounds like progress toward a transition to renewable energy, residential solar panel installations on rooftops in California have dramatically fallen in the last several years, not the least because the California Public Utilities Commission, which is strongly allied with Newsom, fought hard to slash solar incentives. 

Bernadette Del Chiaro is a Senior Vice President with the Environmental Working Group, building the organization in California to continue its groundbreaking work on advancing critical environmental and public health priorities. She has 30 years of experience working through non-profit organizations on the goals of clean energy and a healthier environment. She helped put the new bill into context in an interview with Sonali Kolhatkar.

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FEATURING VIVEK MONTEIRO - Barely three months since the world’s largest democracy was rocked by student-led protests under the satirical name of the Cockroach Janta (People’s) Party, India is facing mass protests once more. This time, public rage has focused on the mass purging of voter rolls. 

Protesters are calling for the firing of Gyanesh Kumar, the chief election commissioner, who is allied with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP). Through a process called the Special Intensive Revision, Kumar has overseen the deletion of 130 million voters since last year - a number equivalent to the entire population of Japan. 

The purges are being done under the guise of cleaning up the voter rolls of dead and duplicate voters and have been found to disproportionately impact Muslims, migrants, women and other marginalized peoples.  

At a mass rally in the capital of New Delhi on October 10th, police forces arbitrarily arrested scores of activists, journalists, and students, and prevented many leaders and members of the Cockroach Janta Party from reaching the protest location. 

Vivek Monteiro was at a solidarity protest in Mumbai on October 10 where he was among those arrested. Monteiro is President of Mumbai Shramik Sangh and several organized labor unions in the sectors of tyre manufacturing, chemicals, engineering, hotels and more. He is a full-time trade unionist with the Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) since 1977, he is also Vice President of CITU Maharashtra and a member of the CITU National working committee, and much more. He happens to be trained as physicist, with a masters from Caltech and a doctorate from Stony Brook University in the US.

He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar from Mumbai about the current protests in India.

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FEATURING RICK CHERTOFF - On Sunday October 18, dozens of pro-Palestinian activists, including Jewish Americans, marched in front of the Simon Weisenthal’s Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, a major institution that receives tax-payer funds and often serves as a mouth-piece of the Israeli government. The protest was led by the No Tolerance for Genocide Committee, which has for months demanded the museum stop ignoring the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. 

Rick Chertoff, a spokesperson for the No Tolerance for Genocide Committee, addressed the museum’s leadership at the October 18 rally and then spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar via video chat for a report from the protest, just before pro-Israel counter protesters descended.

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FEATURING KIMBERLY INEZ-MCGUIRE - 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 Kimberly Inez McGuire, a nationally recognized communications strategist, reproductive justice movement leader, and policy expert with two decades of experience winning campaigns for policy and narrative change. As Executive Director of URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, Kimberly leads the organization in building young people power for reproductive justice.

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FEATURING MICHAEL G. MILLER - While the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution gave Black people in the US the right to vote, it was another hundred years before the Civil Rights movement forced Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, cementing that right. 

But, as the US Supreme Court tilted further and further to the right, it set its sights on the VRA, chipping away at pieces of it, beginning in 2013 with its ruling in Shelby County Vs. Holder. 

The history of the VRA and its decimation is told in a new book by Michael Miller, a professor of political science at Barnard College. The book, co-authored with Kevin T. Morris is called An American Problem: How the Country Built—and the Supreme Court Broke—the Voting Rights Act.

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FEATURING JOSEFINA MORA-CHEUNG - When the Trump administration in 2025 began sending ICE agents to cities around the United States to terrorize, round up, and deport people en masse, Seattle, Washington was not on the list of places with dramatic headlines, in large part because of the city’s sanctuary laws. 

Instead, the northwest city has become a quiet hub for the transfer of people imprisoned by ICE to detention centers around the country. At King County Airport, activists document regular flights transporting shackled people. Joining me to discuss efforts around tracking and stopping such flights is Josefina Mora-Cheung, Director of Organizing for La Resistencia.

Josefina Mora-Cheung is Director of Organizing for La Resistencia, a leading immigrant rights organization based in Seattle, Washington. They spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how activists are challenging the terror of ICE detentions and deportations.

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FEATURING NADINE SMITH - 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 Nadine Smith, President and CEO of Color Of Change, the nation's largest online racial justice organization, and a TIME100 honoree with more than three decades of experience winning civil rights battles. As founding Executive Director of Equality Florida, she helped secure marriage equality and defeat hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills, and she hosts the award-winning radio show and podcast Wide Awake America.

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FEATURING DARIEN POLLOCK - Western philosophy is associated with ivory towers and purity of wisdom. But, my guest Darien Pollock maintains that Socrates is connected to the streets, to the Southside of Atlanta for example. And understanding those connections can help us make sense of social change, of people and place. 

Darien Pollock is assistant professor of philosophy at Boston University. He is the founder and president of the Street Philosophy Institute, Inc., a community organization dedicated to connecting higher education resources to underserved communities, particularly in the rural South. His new book is called Street Knowledge: The Hidden Ways Social Change Happens.

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FEATURING SABRINA BERNADEL - The Trump administration has decimated the civil rights protections of students in schools around the country, undoing decades of progress. This has left students experiencing discrimination with little recourse. Now, the National Center for Youth Law has launched an organized push for enacting and enforcing civil rights legislation at the state level. 

Sabrina Bernadel is Manager of the Education Civil Rights Alliance at the National Center for Youth Law, where she leads a national coalition working to protect students’ rights. She advocates for laws and policies that ensure all students have an equitable opportunity to learn and access to a high-quality education.

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FEATURING REV. JENNIFER GUTIERREZ - In late September, a group of faith leaders, immigrant rights activists, and others, set off on a nearly 100-mile journey by foot from the Adelanto Detention Center in Southern California’s high desert to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Downtown Los Angeles. 

In the searing, record-breaking heat, they walked to draw attention to the relentless violence and violations by federal immigration agents against countless human beings. 

On October 6, the “Clear the Road to Freedom Pilgrimage” culminated in downtown LA and I spoke with Rev Jennifer Gutierrez, one of the walkers during the last leg of the journey.

🔥 🔥 🔥 This interview is exactly the kind of story that can inspire all of us to action. A few hundred subscribers pay to bring such voices to broader audiences.

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Rev. Jennifer Gutierrez is an ordained United Methodist minister and has served as Pastor in several Los Angeles churches. She is Executive Director of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, or CLUE Justice.

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