The Nation Podcasts

“No one has a right to tell you how to organize, to free yourself, and to liberate yourself.”

The fight over Cop City was never just about a police training center. In Atlanta, a multiracial, multigenerational movement brought together environmental justice, land conservation, police abolition, and grassroots organizing to challenge the destruction of a forest and expansion of police power.

In this episode of A People’s Climate, Shilpi Chhotray talks with organizer Kamau Franklin about the strategies behind the Stop Cop City movement—and the lessons it offers for fights still to come. Although the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center was ultimately built, the movement showed how organizers can build power across ideologies, work through decentralized networks, shape the public narrative, and connect struggles that are often treated as separate.

Franklin and Shilpi also discuss the criminalization of protesters, including the killing of forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán. They examine what it means to organize under state repression and ultimately, what the Stop Cop City movement can teach those fighting for justice.

Key Topics

• Climate & the forest: Why protecting Atlanta’s South River Forest was an environmental justice fight
• Movement tactics: The organizing strategies behind Stop Cop City, from town halls and petition drives to direct action, civil disobedience, and decentralized organizing.
• Defining violence: Why organizers challenged the idea that property destruction is equivalent to violence—and who gets to define legitimate protest.
• Organizing across differences: How a decentralized movement brought together people with different ideologies, tactics, and political traditions.
• The power of narrative: How organizers turned “Cop City” into a powerful frame and pushed back against efforts to portray protesters as outsiders or extremists.
• Criminalizing dissent: The killing of forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán and the sweeping RICO charges brought against protesters.
• Building power under repression: How movements can organize when the state is working to divide, intimidate, and silence them.
• Lessons for future fights: What Stop Cop City can teach organizers fighting for climate, racial, and environmental justice beyond Atlanta.

Resources

• Community Movement Builders
• No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement Edited by Micah Herskind Mariah Parker, and Kamau Franklin 

Credits

Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation

Powered by Wildseeds Fund

Host: Shilpi Chhotray

Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker 

Engineer: Ameeta Ganatra

Project Manager: Asia Simms

Kamau Franklin 

Kamau Franklin (he/him) is the founder of Community Movement Builders. He’s been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years. For 18 years, Kamau was a leading member of a national grassroots organization dedicated to the ideas of self-determination and the teachings of Malcolm X. He’s spearheaded organizing work in areas, including youth organizing, police misconduct, and developing sustainable urban communities. Kamau has coordinated community cop-watch programs, liberation schools for youth, electoral and policy campaigns, large-scale community gardens, organizing collectives and alternatives to incarceration programs. Kamau was an attorney for ten years in New York with his own practice in criminal, civil rights and transactional law. He now lives in Atlanta with his two children.

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Neera Tanden has not yet posted a tirade about AP, and we’re starting to take it personally. In this week’s news: the U.S. and Israel prepare for renewed strikes against Iran after the midterms (1:07); an Ansar Allah/Houthi missile strike kills at least 73 people at a military camp in Yemen, while continued attacks force Saudi Arabia to cancel a major investment conference and Pakistan, Britain, Egypt, and France offer defensive support to the kingdom (7:52); Israeli settlers assault an American journalist and attack European diplomats, while Israeli forces detain dozens of volunteers in the West Bank (15:05); North Korea announces the resumption of anti-South Korean loudspeaker broadcasts amid unverified rumors that Kim Jong Un has died (19:12); drone strikes kill hundreds in Sudan and the disputed Abyei region (22:28); Ethiopia establishes a new interim administration in Tigray (25:02); the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to spread (27:01); Ukraine resumes attacks on Russian oil refineries, angering Trump (29:33); Steve Witkoff meets with Zelenskyy and Putin as the U.S. restores intelligence support for Ukraine (30:41); Russia signals a possible return to peace talks (32:28); massive protests over the high cost of living sweep France (37:30); and Haitian armed groups abduct four Salvadoran soldiers, prompting El Salvador to threaten military action (40:58).

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Hyperscale data centers are not an inevitable infrastructure, but a product of capitalist financialization pushing us further from a livable future. Ingrid Burrington interviews Paris Marx about his new book Hyperscale, discussing the history behind the rise of hyperscale data centers and how companies are obscuring their true social and environmental costs to maximize profits before the overinflated bubble bursts.

Ingrid Burrington is the author of Networks of New York and host of RIP Corp. She’s been writing about internet infrastructure for over a decade, including an 18-story online series for The Atlantic in 2015.

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It’s Tech Day here at AP, so Danny and Derek speak with Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University, and writer Ben Tarnoff, co-authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, about Elon Musk's role in contemporary capitalism. They discuss Fordism and Muskism; the influence of apartheid South Africa on Musk's approach to production; his vision of AI and human-machine integration; the political significance of his acquisition of Twitter; DOGE's expansion of government data collection and immigration enforcement; and the potential for regulating or replacing Big Tech.

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Republicans are spending hundreds of millions on the midterms, but their money hasn’t been able to counter the crisis of affordability, the disgust with Trump’s corruption, and the quality of many of the Democratic candidates. Harold Meyerson comments – he’s editor at large of The American Prospect.

Also: Katha Pollit argues that the gang rape at a Cornell fraternity party could have been stopped--if someone had bothered to intervene. But no one did. “Where were the good guys?” She asks.

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Dr. Isabella Weber’s new book is called Anti-Fascist Economics. As a native of Nuremberg, where the Nazis staged their famous mass rallies, there’s another term she also uses: the economics of “never again.”

We think this book is such an important intervention in the world right now. So we were thrilled to have Isabella on the show to discuss why the rise of today's authoritarian movements is not an accident, but is rooted in an economic order that has treated regular people as expendable while elevating markets above democratic choice.

In the face of rising costs, what if we didn’t take the primacy of corporate profits and market fundamentalism as a given? What if, instead, we said, “Let’s do something about this! Let’s take on the corporate profiteering and stabilize the price of essential goods and actually use government to help people so they don’t elect a bunch of fucking fascists!”

If you care about democracy, you should read Isabella’s book. And you should definitely check out this episode.

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“This is about life. And this extractive industry is not a giver of life, it is a taker of life.”

On March 23, 2026, a massive explosion tore through the Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, shaking homes and sending a plume of smoke over a community that has lived with oil and petrochemical pollution for generations. In this episode of A People’s Climate, host Shilpi Chhotray talks with John Beard Jr., a former refinery worker who spent 38 years inside the industry, about what happens when global oil decisions become local realities.

From U.S. policy toward Venezuelan oil to the expansion of petrochemical production and the world's demand for plastics, Beard connects the decisions made far from Port Arthur to the people who pay the price close to home. They explore who benefits from the fossil fuel economy, who bears its risks, and what it would take to build a transition that doesn't leave communities to pay for it with their health and their lives.

Key Topics

• Global oil, local consequences: How decisions about oil, foreign policy, and energy affect communities right here in the United States.
• The price of fossil fuels: Why communities like Port Arthur bear the pollution, health risks, and industrial disasters that make fossil fuel profits possible.
• The Valero explosion: What the March 2026 refinery explosion revealed about the risks fence-line communities live with every day.
• Oil & petrochemicals: How Gulf Coast communities became sacrifice zones for refining, plastics, and global fossil fuel demand.
• Who benefits?: The disconnect between the industry's promise of jobs and prosperity and the economic realities facing Port Arthur residents.
• A just transition: What it means to move away from fossil fuels while repairing the damage already done and protecting workers and communities.
• Building power: Why communities need political power to challenge an industry whose reach extends from local government to global geopolitics.

Resources

• Port Arthur Community Action Network
• A People’s Climate Episode: An Unreasonable Woman with Diane Wilson - Another Texan’s historic win against the petrochemical industry
• U.S. Gulf South Climate and Environmental Justice organizations:
• Better Brazoria: Clean Air & Water 
• Cheek Texas Community Association 
• Climate Conversation Brazoria County 
• Concerned Citizens of St. John Parish
• For a Better Bayou
• Freeport Haven Project for Environmental Justice
• Houston Climate Movement
• Mossville Environmental Action Now (MEAN)
• Permian Gulf Coast Coalition
• RISE St. James 
• S.A.F.E. Communities
• San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper
• South End Charlton-Pollard Greater Historic Community Association
• Southern Sector Rising
• t.e.j.a.s. (Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services)
• The Vessel Project of Louisiana

Credits

Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation

Powered by Wildseeds Fund

Host: Shilpi Chhotray

Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker 

Engineer: Ameeta Ganatra

Project Manager: Asia Simms

John Beard, Jr.

John Beard, Jr. is the Founder and CEO of the Port Arthur Community Action Network. After working in the oil industry for 38 years, Beard became a community advocate in his hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, dedicated to holding the industry accountable. He founded the Port Arthur Community Action Network to fight for health and safety protections in an area dense with refineries, export terminals, and petrochemical plants. Over the past year, Beard has emerged as a national and global environmental justice leader, serving as a civil society delegate to the U.N. Plastic Treaty negotiations, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Conference of Parties negotiations on climate change.

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Metallica says they stay out of politics, so Danny and Derek are reassessing their approach to the show. In this week’s news: Navi Pillay wins the Nobel Peace Prize, angering Trump (3:51); Ansar Allah strikes Saudi airports and oil facilities (7:58) while fighting continues on multiple fronts in Yemen (11:35); attacks on commercial ships escalate near the Strait of Hormuz (13:45), and the U.S. prepares a new bombing campaign against Iran (15:59); Israeli forces kill at least eight people in Gaza on the first anniversary of the “ceasefire” as the Palestinian Authority postpones elections until at least September 2027 (19:12); in southern Lebanon, Israeli forces demolish dozens of towns and villages (22:22); China’s trade surplus grows at a record pace (24:04); Egyptian drone strikes kill at least 72 gold miners in Sudan (25:43); Ethiopian forces advance toward the Eritrean border (28:20); former Congolese president Joseph Kabila forms a new rebel coalition with M23 (31:38) as the country’s Ebola outbreak surpasses 9,000 confirmed cases (33:27); Trump suspends sanctions on Russian diesel exports and clashes with Zelensky (34:24); Trump declares a Russia-Ukraine energy ceasefire that fails to take hold as Ukraine reports several days without Western intelligence on Russian airstrikes (37:40); Ukrainian forces report temporary restrictions on Starlink service (38:52); and the U.S. seeks control of frozen Russian assets held in Europe (43:07).

Don’t forget to pre-order Welcome to the Crusades: The Second Crusade with promo code CRUSADES15 for 15% off. Offer is valid through October 27!

More of Danny’s work at Imperialist Realism.

More of Derek’s work at Foreign Exchanges.

Catch a replay of last night’s livestream.

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Data centers are being approved without proper oversight into their broader impacts, but there are organizations pushing back. Martha Dark joins Paris Marx to discuss her work at Foxglove and how legal challenges against data centers are imposing stronger rules and reframing false narratives from policymakers and Big Tech.

Martha Dark is co-executive director of Foxglove.

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Danny and Derek speak with historian Stuart Schrader about the history and political power of police unions in the US. They discuss the rise of police unions in the 1960s, their relationship with organized labor, resistance to the civil rights movement and affirmative action, the role of race in policing, bipartisan support for policing and the 1990s crime bills, the growing political influence of the Border Patrol union, and the future of police reform and abolition.

Get your copy of Stuart’s book Blue Power: How Police Organize to Protect and Serve Themselves.

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