The Watchdog

The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.

The well propagated myth is that Britain functions democratically. This, of course, flies in the face of a system where a monarchy established by the Normans in 1066 still holds weight in society. More than 1,000 laws passed through the British parliament have been vetted by the representatives of the Royal Family. There 792 unelected peers and 26 unelected bishops in the House of Lords in comparison to merely 650 elected members of parliament.

Even to get to this very limited level of political representation where all people could vote regardless of property ownership it took over 300 years of struggle – from the Putney Debates and the Levellers to the Chartists and the Suffragettes. It even entailed people sacrificing their lives for the right to vote with the slaughter of protestors in Manchester at the now infamous Peterloo Massacre. It took centuries of agitation, prison, deportation to penal colonies and World War I for the British establishment to grant universal suffrage. And it was not even until after 1928 that all people over 21 were allowed to vote for political representation in parliament.

But Britons still live in a managed society. Today, Lowkey is joined by Kit Klarenberg to discuss the ways in which elements within the British establishment have been able to impose their will on the supposed democratic system in Britain over the past 100 years.

Starting with Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Prime Minister smeared with a fake letter in the 1920s to Harold Wilson being spied on and conspired against through Operation Clockwork Orange, the intelligence services have been a vital constituency for any political leader to win over and keep on side.

The sweeping aside of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister has made headlines across the world, as Conservative Party figures fight for the leading role in the country. However, it seems there may have been more than meets the eye to the drip feeding of negative stories about Johnson over the past six months.

Lowkey and Kit Klarenberg examine the evidence of possible interference in the political system to achieve the removal of Boris Johnson from power.

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. He writes for The Grayzone and MintPress News.

Join Lowkey today for a critically important discussion about current events and the future of the world, and do not forget to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

 🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.

On this week’s edition of The Watchdog podcast, Lowkey explores the growing movement to free Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and is joined by his father John Shipton, to do so. Imprisoned in Belmarsh high security prison in London since 2019, and before that confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy, Assange has spent a decade locked up. If extradited to the United States, he faces up to 175 years in prison.

Yet there are signs that his future might be brighter than his past. The global movement to free him, Shipton explains, is growing. In Australia, dozens of members of parliament have come together to lobby for Assange’s release. In the United Kingdom, 23 MPs from across the political spectrum have done the same. Indeed, the parliaments of every single European nation have an Assange friendship group. And 26 major NGOs have signed a letter of support that was recently sent to President Biden.

But, as Shipton explained to Lowkey, these groups are not acting on their own accord, but rather are reacting to popular pressure. As he said:

The Biden administration is also coming under attack from Latin American nations. Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador recently publicly stated that if Biden extradites Assange, he should tear down the Statue of Liberty as freedom will be over.

“He is the best journalist of our time in the world and has been very unfairly treated, worse than a criminal..This is an embarrassment to the world,” Lopez Obrador added.

Both Shipton and Assange feature in a new documentary film, Ithaka, which details the struggle to free Assange and the emotional toll it has taken on his family. The film is directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton. Late last month, Lowkey hosted a special screening of the film in London, alongside Shipton and Assange’s wife, Stella.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

 🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Much to his embarrassment, U.K. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer hit the headlines last week, after footage of him being accosted by local activist Audrey White went viral. Millions of people around the world have watched the video showing Starmer physically wilting at the ferocity of White’s convictions, as she accuses him of “feeding into Tory ideology” and actively destroying his own party. Commenters have noted that footage of a politician actually being held accountable by a member of the public is as refreshing as it is entertaining.

Just days after the event, she received a letter informing her she had been purged from the Labour Party.

Ms. White has refused interviews with many major outlets but gladly accepted the chance to speak to Lowkey. A proud Liverpudlian, Ms. White was aghast when Starmer began writing a column for The Sun newspaper, an outlet owned by notorious arch-conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch. The Sun has a particularly dismal reputation in Liverpool after it lied about the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, accusing Liverpool F.C. fans of urinating on and robbing the corpses of their dead comrades. In total, 97 people were killed after authorities botched their handling of a football crowd, leading to death by stampede and crushing.

Talking with Lowkey, Ms. White said she felt Starmer had some nerve to show his face in Liverpool after allying with Murdoch’s media empire:

Ms. White’s comments echo many of the hundreds of thousands of people who joined the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in 2015. Starmer, however, has dramatically reversed the party’s direction, suppressing dissent from below. On Starmer, veteran political scientist Noam Chomsky said that  "He's returning Labour to a party that will be Thatcher-lite in the style of Tony Blair."

Audrey White is a longtime activist who first came to national attention in 1983. As the manager of a clothes store, she stood up for her workers’ rights to have company-supplied uniforms. In response, she was sexually harassed and fired on the spot. Her refusal to go quietly, however, plus the huge support she received from people around the country, ended with a change in the law that outlawed sexual harassment at work. White’s story was turned into the 1987 movie “Business as Usual”, starring Glenda Jackson.

Ms. White was also targeted by the press and the right-wing of the Labour Party during the anti-semitism crisis surrounding the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Today, she talks about the viral Starmer moment, Corbyn, the spirit of Liverpool, and her life of organizing.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

 🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

The well propagated myth is that Britain functions democratically. This, of course, flies in the face of a system where a monarchy established by the Normans in 1066 still holds weight in society. More than 1,000 laws passed through the British parliament have been vetted by the representatives of the Royal Family. There 792 unelected peers and 26 unelected bishops in the House of Lords in comparison to merely 650 elected members of parliament.

Even to get to this very limited level of political representation where all people could vote regardless of property ownership it took over 300 years of struggle – from the Putney Debates and the Levellers to the Chartists and the Suffragettes. It even entailed people sacrificing their lives for the right to vote with the slaughter of protestors in Manchester at the now infamous Peterloo Massacre. It took centuries of agitation, prison, deportation to penal colonies and World War I for the British establishment to grant universal suffrage. And it was not even until after 1928 that all people over 21 were allowed to vote for political representation in parliament.

But Britons still live in a managed society. Today, Lowkey is joined by Kit Klarenberg to discuss the ways in which elements within the British establishment have been able to impose their will on the supposed democratic system in Britain over the past 100 years.

Starting with Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Prime Minister smeared with a fake letter in the 1920s to Harold Wilson being spied on and conspired against through Operation Clockwork Orange, the intelligence services have been a vital constituency for any political leader to win over and keep on side.

The sweeping aside of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister has made headlines across the world, as Conservative Party figures fight for the leading role in the country. However, it seems there may have been more than meets the eye to the drip feeding of negative stories about Johnson over the past six months.

Lowkey and Kit Klarenbeg examine the evidence of possible interference in the political system to achieve the removal of Boorish John from power.

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. He writes for The Grayzone and MintPress News.

Join Lowkey today for a critically important discussion about current events and the future of the world, and do not forget to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.

The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

 🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

 
"Everyone can see that the U.S. has been in decline for several years,” Ben Norton told Watchdog host Lowkey today, explaining that the days of a unipolar world where Washington dominates the planet are over.

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the founder and editor of Multipolarista, a website dedicated to presenting international and geopolitical news through the lens of multipolarity. “Obviously this is going to be a decades-long process of decline,” he said of the United States, “But we are very clearly seeing alternatives emerging.”

In the past two decades, the U.S. grip on global power has been slipping, and new nations and organizations have begun to emerge that challenge American dominance. One of these is the BRICS, an economic and increasingly political bloc of emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Argentina, Iran and others have expressed an interest in joining this alliance, which has now laid out plans for its own bank and international currency, two moves strike at the heart of American economic hegemony.

“Now that the U.S. has sanctioned one-quarter of the global population, and especially now with the economic war on Russia, BRICS has emerged as this new economic infrastructure bringing countries together that want to get around Western sanctions,” Norton said.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spurred the U.S. and its NATO allies to attempt to force poorer nations to turn their backs on Russia, politically and economically. And they have been trying to do the same in an effort to prevent China’s continued economic rise. But it has been to little avail, as even nations not known for defying orders have refused to line up behind the West.

For Norton, this is because these states see the writing on the wall: that U.S. economic and political power is waning and that the 21st century will be a multipolar one. As he explained:

China is now the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, while Russia is a huge source of vital commodities such as oil and natural gas, food and fertilizer. The U.S., by contrast, has little to offer except missiles and Netflix. Yet through coups, sanctions and other forms of economic warfare, the U.S. has been able to dictate the economic path of the world.

“What the U.S. is doing is trying to prevent any alternatives to the neoliberal capitalist model,” Norton said. Washington retains a strong military edge, however. The worry is that if all it has is a hammer, it will see nails everywhere it goes.

Another region challenging the U.S.-run global order is Latin America, where we have seen a resurgence of left-wing anti-imperialist movements. Many of these have come to power already. Later on this year, however, Brazil is poised to elect Lula da Silva as president. If the largest and most populous country in the region re-elects an anti-imperialist socialist as its leader (as polls predict it will), it could be a significant and permanent blow against American power in the Western hemisphere, a region President Joe Biden calls “America’s front yard.”

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

 🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.

In a massive blow to its operations, Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems has been forced to abandon its chique London headquarters, thanks to sustained pressure from Palestine Action. The final blow came earlier this month after activists threw red paint over the office and blockaded its entrance. This comes on top of the news that in January, Elbit Systems had decided to sell their arms factory in Oldham, U.K., at a significant loss, after the site was repeatedly occupied by the same group.

Today, Lowkey speaks to one of the co-founders of Palestine Action, Huda Amori. Originally from Bolton (around 12 miles from Oldham), Amori is Palestinian-Iraqi. Her father was chased from his home by Israeli soldiers in 1967.

“This is a company whose whole business model is based on the destruction of Palestine,” she told Lowkey, adding:

One of the world’s largest arms manufacturers, Elbit produces much of the Israeli Defense Forces’ machinery and ammunition and markets its products around the world as “battle tested” on Palestinians. Its products are sold globally, notably to the Indian military, helping their efforts to occupy Kashmir, and to British law enforcement, who are using the company’s facial recognition software.

“Whenever you see an attack on Palestinians, 99% of the time you can trace that back to Elbit Systems. If they are not producing the whole weapon, they are producing parts of it,” Amori said.

Despite

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is not just being fought in the streets of Hebron or Gaza; it is also being fought in the classrooms of America. Leading this struggle for the Israeli side is a group called the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS). Jerusalem-based journalist Jessica Buxbaum has been investigating the ICS and scrutinizing their role in shifting the public debate in the U.S. Jessica joins Lowkey to discuss her recent MintPress News investigation, “Institute for Curriculum Services: How an Israel Lobby Group Infiltrated US Education.

In recent years, progressive activism has forced the United States to begin to deal with the reality of its racist part. These anti-racist movements have attempted to correct what they see as a whitewashing of racist violence from history textbooks. The ICS has attempted to position itself in this post-Black Lives Matter milieu, claiming that their organization exists to give a more accurate picture of Jewish history in textbooks and clear up lingering misconceptions and stereotypes. “But really,” Buxbaum told Lowkey today, “they are just a front for the Israeli lobby.”

Jessica Buxbaum is an investigative journalist specializing in Middle Eastern politics and current affairs. Aside from MintPress News, her work can also be found in Middle East Eye, The New Arab, and Gulf News.

Buxbaum sent Freedom of Information requests to the education boards of all 50 states and found that the ICS was involved in a pressure campaign to monitor and change the wording and framing of school textbooks across the country in order to present a one-sided, pro-Israel narrative to children.

Examples included requests to delete all references to “Palestine,” “Palestinian territories,” or the “West Bank”; removing information about Palestinian culture and heritage; and even demands to amend maps, so that areas such as East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights appear not as illegally annexed but as territorially part of Israel.

“A lot of it is about erasing Palestine, anything that references the natives of Palestine, Palestinians as an indigenous people, that Palestinians have inhabited the land for thousands of years. All those things, they want to have deleted,” Buxbaum told Lowkey.

Another key prong in the ICS attack on the truth is to present Palestinian leadership as violent and the Israeli state as a noble, peace-loving democracy. The word “settlers,” the ICS requested, should be replaced by “communities.” “Wall” with “security fence,” “militant” with “terrorist,” and so on. References to Israel capturing the West Bank in 1967 should be removed and depictions of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat should include that he “direct[ed] countless terrorist attacks against Israelis.” It should also, the ICS suggests, be made clear that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East.”

The ICS has hosted dozens of training seminars with thousands of schoolteachers across the United States, presenting the issue in a framework conducive to the outlook of the Israeli government. The organization has also recommended that American students be discouraged from finding their own sources of information on the internet, and instead be instructed to use resources from the Anti-Defamation League or the Jewish Virtual Library.

However, attempts to propagandize children with a pro-Israeli government narrative are not limited to the United States. Lowkey also shares his research into how a similar phenomenon is happening in the United Kingdom.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

 🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Elon Musk is not some crusading rebel railing against the establishment; he’s one of the key drivers of the U.S. surveillance state. That is the message that Alan MacLeod gave Lowkey in this latest episode of “The Watchdog.”

While commentators have been heartened and dismayed in equal measure at the prospect of the South African billionaire’s takeover of Twitter, they all appear to agree that Musk will make huge changes to the platform. Yet very few have acknowledged the basic fact that Musk’s fortune comes in no small part due to his close connections to the national security state.

As MacLeod explained, SpaceX was only able to get off the ground with the help of In-Q-Tel, the venture capitalist wing of the CIA, as well as with huge financial backing from NASA. Today, the company competes with Lockheed Martin and Boeing for gigantic military rocket contracts, helping organizations like the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office launch their spy satellites into orbit, thereby performing a crucial service to the global surveillance system.

The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

 🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

On May 24, an 18-year-old gunman fatally shot 22 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Police reportedly refused to confront the killer, locked him in a room full of children, physically prevented parents from getting involved and even allegedly rescued their own children first. 

The massacre has once again brought the United States’ unique obsession with firearms to the fore, with renewed calls to ban assault rifles. But even among gun control advocates, few realize the connections between the Second Amendment and white supremacy.

Today’s guest is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Originally from Oklahoma, Dunbar-Ortiz is a writer, historian and activist, possibly best known for her 2014 classic book, “An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States.” She argues that the context behind the Second Amendment is that the newly-independent United States needed “well-regulated militias” of white men to “kill Indians and take their land”, or to form slave patrols that would hunt down black people fleeing their captivity. It is out of these slave patrols that the first police departments were formed.

Ultimately, she argues, the need for such armed militias arose from the fact that the white colonists were on recently stolen land, surrounded by hostile groups who were trying to get their land back. As she notes, it was a crime to give or sell a gun to a Native American. 

The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

 🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

The cold-blooded killing of Shireen Abu Akleh earlier this month has made headlines around the world. An Israeli soldier shot the veteran Al-Jazeera journalist in the head while she was reporting on their raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin.

Shireen’s niece Lina first heard of the news from her father, who phoned her early in the morning to tell her she was injured. Today, Watchdog host Lowkey speaks to Lina Abu Akleh about her aunt’s work, legacy, and the ongoing war against the press.

Support MintPress work by becoming a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MintPressNews

Follow Lowkey: https://twitter.com/Lowkey0nline
Follow MintPress News: https://twitter.com/MintPressNews

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

 🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.