FEATURING TREVOR SMITH - The United States turns 250 years old this year, an anniversary that ought to spark sober reflections about the violent origins of the nation, but instead is being turned into a white supremacist spectacle that erases the history of genocide, enslavement, and land disposession. President Trump, who announced a massive series of events called Freedom250, is now displeased, calling for thecancellationof a planned musical performance after too many musicians dropped out.
In the meantime, organizations that have long advocated for an honest reckoning of American history, are launching a new ritual calledReclamation Day.
Trevor Smith is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of theBLIS Collective. He is a writer, researcher, and strategist focused on racial inequality, wealth inequality, reparations, and narrative change. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what Reclamation Day is and why it was conceived.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: This incredible Reclamation Day that you and others have organized is such a different approach than what we're seeing, of course, from the White House. But it's also different from even non-White House related, non-federal related celebrations that are at smaller scale because we've had this massive push to undo diversity inclusion, equity efforts, and to generally push back against racial equity. How do you reflect on what is being planned this year? Is it difficult for you to face the prevailing narrative in the coming month?
Trevor Smith: Yeah. It's a really great question. Again, thank you for having me. I wouldn't say that it has been difficult. If anything, planning and curating Reclamation Day has brought me personally so much joy.
But then also as an organization with BLIS, which stands for Black Liberation Indigenous Sovereignty, it's really grown our presence and put us in front of so many different artists, storytellers, collaborators. And my co-founder, Savannah, and I, when we started BLIS, we were really thinking about how do we create the space for solidarity across different movements and across different groups, particularly Black and Indigenous folks.
And when we were thinking about Reclamation Day last year, before it was even called Reclamation Day, we were really thinking about how do we create a counter commemoration to the Fourth of July, while still also celebrating Black and Indigenous joy and resilience. And I think we have really captured that with Reclamation Day. And so it's not a “cancel America” day. It is not a cancel the Fourth of July day. It's a Reclamation Day for us to reclaim our stories, to reclaim our narratives, and to really celebrate Black and Indigenous and working-class joy and resilience in these first 250 years of this nation.
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FEATURING OREN ROBINSON - More than a dozen US Armed Forces havediedin the course of President Donald Trump’s war on Iran. A man whocampaigned against endless wars, has rebranded the Defense Department as theDepartment of War, and has embroiled the nation in a conflict that seems to have had little cause for provocation, and no end date in sight. What does this mean for young people who, each year are lured to join the military at recruitment events and centers on and near school campuses?
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first get your reflection on the fact that we have a president who campaigned to end wars, because it turns out that wars are sort of uniformly not popular on both sides of the spectrum, and changed the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Does that framing, or did that framing, and the fact that we are in this new war, worry you as somebody who combats military recruitment of young people?
Oren Robinson: Well, again, thanks for having us. We work in public schools and unfortunately, many of our volunteer veterans who come into classrooms with us to speak with students and talk about their real experiences to balance the recruiter's sales pitch will often mention the joke that regardless of the president, we're going to war.
So really, even though the name has changed, the real risk of hyper-militarization of our schools has always been there, and we do see these new threats as a very startling new advent. And that's why there's a lot of action actually that's happening just this past year, that we haven't seen this type of anti-militarism in maybe a generation or more.
"This campaign to defeat [Proposition D in San Francisco] has been backed by six, count them, six billionaires, and a whole bunch of companies with really big gaps between their CEO and their worker pay." -Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org.Unlock this and all other interviews by upgrading your subscription NOW.
FEATURING SARAH ANDERSON - Californians on Tuesday headed to the polls for a major primary race that not only decided on nominees for the governor’s race in November, but also voted for local ballot measures that raise taxes to pay for social services in an economy that is squeezing ordinary people. San Francisco, home to many billionaires and corporate executives, is considering a tax on companies with egregiously overpaid CEOs, calledProposition D(as of this publication, the measure istoo close to call). And, unions are hoping to place abillionaire taxon the November ballot to fund essential services like healthcare.
Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits theInequality.orgwebsite and weekly newsletter at the Institute for Policy Studies. She is a leading expert on CEO pay, having produced an annual Executive Excess report for more than 20 years. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about San Francisco's Proposition D and other efforts nationally to target overpaid CEOs.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
SonaliKolhatkar: By the time a lot of folks hear this interview and watch it, the race in California will be over. Ballots will be getting counted. Some results will be known. But let's talk in general terms about this particular measure in California that I'm sure really is a big focus for you, considering that it directly impacts overpaid CEOs, your favorite topic.
What is Proposition D and why is there a competing proposition that would lower tax on businesses in the works? How does it all work?
Sarah Anderson: Yeah. So the way it works is the overpaid CEO tax raises taxes on companies, large corporations that are operating in San Francisco, and that pay their CEO more than 100 times as much as their median worker pay. And so essentially, it gives these corporations a choice. They can either narrow their pay gaps by lifting up worker pay or bringing down CEO pay to a reasonable level of less than 100 to one, and then they wouldn't owe an extra dime in taxes.
But if they want to stick with those really extremely wide gaps, which a lot of research shows is not good for business because it undermines employee morale and productivity, but if they want to stick with those, then they're going to have to owe more taxes that will go towards vital public services in the city, which are really strained right now because of federal government cutbacks.
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FEATURING JEANETTE HUEZO -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 on Rising Up for Justice, we'll feature Jeannette Huezo, Executive Director and Senior Popular Educator atUnited for a Fair Economy. Jeanette, who is originally from El Salvador, has led transformative work on racial and economic justice, popular education, language justice, and healing for liberation since 2001.
Through her leadership and organizing, she has empowered immigrants, women, workers, Black communities, Indigenous communities, and other communities of color to build collective power and help shape a more just and equitable society.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So first, tell me a little bit about United for a Fair Economy itself. What is the organization's main goals, and how do you go about putting them together? How do you go about achieving those goals?
Jeanette Huezo: UFE has 22 years of existence, and from the beginning, we started working around the economic inequality issues that have been affecting everyone. And how we are doing our main goal is support social movement that have been working for racial and economic justice.
We have been doing this since the beginning, creating some political economic analysis for the people to understand how the system is working for some people and for others, it's not. Also, we are doing a lot of supporting on leadership development, supporting network and coalitions. We are doing a lot of that work that we believe that people need to speak each other, and sometimes they are doing the same work, but they are not working together. We are doing that. In that way, they can really build power together.
A powerful new book explains why our drugs cost so much and what to do about it. Author Tahir Amin explains, "what I see happening with the Trump administration's plan, this most favored nation drug pricing and Trump Rx, is actually it's going to get other countries to pay higher prices under the ruse that, oh, Americans will then see lower prices. That's not going to happen."
FEATURING TAHIR AMIN - The US Council of Economic Advisers this month released areportassessing consumer prices for pharmaceuticals andconcludedthat Americans pay the highest drug prices in the world and that the developing world pays too little. What is missing from the report is the power of pharmaceutical corporations to set prices and reap massive profits from desperate and sick people, while maintaining monopoly power. That’s the subject of a new book calledPharma Monopoly: The Battle for the Future of Medicines.
Tahir Amin is a founder and CEO of theInitiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK). He has also served as advisor/consultant to international groups including the European Patent Office, the World Health Organization, and Unitaid, and has testified before the US Congress on patents and unsustainable drug prices. Tahir spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar recently about his book, co-authored with Rohit Malpani.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, you focus in your book primarily in the beginning on the COVID-19 vaccines because it's such a great and such a recent example of the way in which the battle over drug prices played out internationally versus here in the United States and revealed how pharmaceutical companies and the politicians who defend them conspire, if you will, to keep drugs to themselves or control access. Tell us that story of what it was that the battle over access to COVID-19 vaccines revealed to you as somebody who works on making drugs sustainable.
Tahir Amin: Yeah. It was really one of the key drivers as to why myself and my coauthor really decided to write this book after 20 years of working in what is known as the Access to Medicines movement. What we saw play out during COVID was this really an apartheid system, which not only just happens between medicines not reaching people in the Global South, but actually also happens here in the United States and also even in Europe, in the more rich, wealthier countries, where many people cannot afford their medicines.
And in the COVID example was so many people did not even see a first shot of the vaccine. I think by some counts, 2.2 billion people by the time the pandemic was officially announced as over in May 2023.
Imagine a world without Citizens United... My guest Tom Moore is helping realize it:"It's not regulation; it's redefinition. States create corporations, and they give powers to all the corporations that operate within their states. And the Supreme Court has said consistently for 200 years that that is a matter of state law, that the federal courts don't have anything to do with that." Make your day brighter with some good news for a change by unlocking the interview. CLICK BELOW.
FEATURING TOM MOORE - The Governor of Hawaii, Josh Green, just signed into law alandmark piece of legislationthat has the power to undo corporate moneyed interference in politics. The law undermines the basis of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that has flooded election races with seemingly limitless resources and skewed the political landscape. Currently more than a dozen states are considering a similar approach as Hawaii.
Tom Moore is a senior fellow for democracy policy at theCenter for American Progressin Washington, DC and is the originator of the innovative legal basis that Hawai'i's law is based on. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the latest victory.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So last we spoke was a few months ago, and we were examining a similar effort in Montana, which is actually where I believe things went quite far before any other state did. But Montana is in the process of collecting signatures to put it to voters directly in the November ballot. And we'll talk about Montana later, but let's focus on Hawaii. What exactly is the law that Hawaii passed, and how did it do it so soon?
Tom Moore: Well, they made it through their legislature. It was just a regular legislative process rather than going to the voters. And they had a number of bills introduced. They picked out the best one among them, moved that forward, went through two Senate committees and two House committees and a conference committee.
Each step of the way looked like it was steps away from death. And the governor signed it very, very quickly. It was all a very, very pleasant surprise. We worked hard to testify in favor of the bill and get some good arguments out there, some good responses out and that kind of thing. But it was not a sure thing until the very last second.
FEATURING INDIA WALTON - After many months of obstruction, the Democratic National Committee finally released anunfinished draftof an assessment that was meant to dissect the party’s 2024 failure in winning the White House and control of Congress. Critics from all corners roundly dismissed the DNC autopsy as incomplete, and a reflection of precisely why the party has failed to hold on to power in spite of upholding ideals backed by most Americans.
India Walton is an advocate for criminal legal reform, improving access to healthcare, safe staffing, and affordable housing. She was the 2021 Democratic nominee for mayor of Buffalo, New York and is currently a Senior Strategist withRootsActionand RootsAction Education Fund. Roots Action recently released its ownreporton the 2024 election. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the DNC report and RootsAction's own autopsy.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's first talk about the DNC's report before we compare it to what Roots Action put out. What exactly was this report? It was not finished. I understand someone named Paul Rivera authored it. Why was the DNC dragging its feet into releasing this? It just seems like a big mess all around, a reflection, as I mentioned, of the mess the Democratic Party is in.
India Walton: Yeah. I completely agree. So before the DNC released its own report, Roots Action released an autopsy, but what we said was not anything that wasn't common knowledge. So we know that the Democrats lost to Trump because there was a failure to denounce a genocide happening.
There was a failure of a mainstream economic platform that prioritized working people, which is the majority of us. There was a lack of communication to young people. And in the releasing of the autopsy, the same things were missing. So it's like you are making a report about why you lost, but it appears to be that you still don't even understand why that happened.
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FEATURING NICK TILSEN -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Nick Tilsen, the Founder and CEO ofNDN Collectivejoins us. Nick is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. He has more than 20 years of experience in movement building, organizing and equitable community development.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So NDN Collective has been around for a little while. What is the organization's main goal? And it's the letters NDN, for our radio audience. How do you explain what the organization is, its main focus?
Nick Tilsen: Yeah. So, NDN Collective, NDN is just slang for Indian. It's what we've called ourselves in sort of reclaiming that term. We've been around, we're in our eighth year of existence now. In our eighth year. We just finished our seventh year.
NDN Collective is dedicated to building Indigenous power, and supporting the self-determination of Indigenous people that are doing the work of defending, developing, and decolonizing. And how we define that is defending air, land, water, rights, community. Developing regenerative and inclusive economies based on our values. Decolonizing through the revitalization of Indigenous languages, ceremonies, life ways.
And NDN Collective is a movement infrastructure, that organization that supports Indigenous people throughout Turtle Island who are doing that work. And we have been a backbone organization of the Land Back movement, which is a movement dedicated to the returning of stolen Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands.
"Cuba poses no threat whatsoever to the United States, not to any country, really, in the world," says Netfa Freeman, a longtime solidarity activist.Unlock the full interview video and transcript by clicking the button below.
FEATURING NETFA FREEMAN - After decades of sanctions on Cuba, the Trump administration has brought the Caribbean island to the brink, isolating it from most of the world. Cuba has been dealing withmassive shortages of food, fuel and medicine, that have left Cubans struggling with day-to-day survival.
Meanwhile Politico reports that a U.S. government source claims the Trump administration is on theverge of launching a military strikeon Cuba. Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canelrespondedto such rumors warning that it would “cause a bloodbath with incalculable consequences,” and that it had a right todefenditself from American aggression.
Netfa Freeman is an organizer withPan-African Community Action(PACA) and on the Coordinating Committee of theBlack Alliance for Peace. Netfa is also co-host/producer of the WPFW radio show and podcast Voices With Vision. He has been intimately involved in the movement for solidarity with Cuba since the 90s and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the latest news regarding US-Cuba relations.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Tell me first how serious the situation is in Cuba. We covered it a little bit earlier this year. Obviously, the island has had to deal with many decades of, they've called it an embargo, sanctions, whatever, just policies that have isolated it.
But the Trump administration ramped it up, and we've seen very dire reports of there being no power, completely dwindling oil supplies. What is the latest situation?
Netfa Freeman: Well, yeah, the situation is very serious, and as you said, it's been serious for a long time. But depending on which administration is in power, it's always been a blockade against Cuba. We refer to it as a blockade because ever since it's been implemented, it has been a multifaceted and protracted act of war against the country.
Now, as you said, the Trump administration has ramped it up. A lot of things on the ground in Cuba are very dire. With their major means of tightening the screws has been the denial of oil to the country, which, of course, with any place, it affects everything. From the ability to transfer food and things across the island, to generating power. Things in, for example, equipment in hospitals. There are just so many facets of life that any country that had to deal with the denial of oil and all forms of oil would have to struggle with, on top of the blockade that it's already been having to deal with for decades.
FEATURING DR. PAUL SONG - California voters are in the thick of a high-stakes primary race for governor, in which “single payer” healthcare, an issue that was oncecentral, has been pushed to the sidelines. Of the top five candidates, only one has unequivocally adopted a model of healthcare that would put the United Stateson par with the rest of the industrialized world.
Billionaire Tom Steyer, running as a Democrat, says single payer isthe only wayto bring down spiraling healthcare costs. But in 2020,Steyer ran for Presidenton a platform touting a “public option,” and attacking Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders’ single payer healthcare plan. Now, Steyer has reversed that position, earning the coveted endorsement of the California Nurses Association (CNA), one of the state’smost aggressive proponentsof single payer.
Dr. Paul Song is a member ofPhysicians for a National Health Programand the former co-chair of the Campaign for a Healthy California. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what it would take to make single payer healthcare a reality in California.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So let's first talk about the fact that it seems as though single-payer has not really been a huge issue in the governor's race as maybe it has been in previous years. For those people who work on it, it's the issue, but in the debates, it's just come up a little bit. The main issues are affordability, which of course, healthcare is a part of that, but it doesn't come up as much, and homelessness has been raised quite a bit, and then, of course, the war in Iran. Why do you think this has not been such a big issue? It seems as though everybody in the establishment has kind of given up and said, "Well, it's never going to be practical." What do you think?
Dr. Paul Song: I think there are two reasons for that. One is that actually, ironically, uninsured as a percent of our California population is at the lowest it's been in a long time. It's only two million people right now that lack health insurance, so I think for that reason, a lot of people feel that it's less of an issue than it was before.
And secondly, for those of us like myself who've been involved in the single-payer movement for most of our lives, it's easy to have become discouraged based on the false promises of Gavin Newsom when he ran and said he was going to run as a single-payer candidate, and the numerous attempts where activists have tried to advance legislation only to see it just killed in Sacramento and not even be brought up for a vote.
So putting all those things together, I think a lot of people have sort of soured, not on the idea of it, but just on the feasibility of having people that are really dedicated in Sacramento to make it happen.
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FEATURING CASSANDRA LOPEZ -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Cassandra Lopez joins us. She is the Litigation Director atAl Otro Lado, a binational organization dedicated to protecting the rights and dignity of immigrants in Mexico and the United States. In this role, she litigates habeas corpus petitions on behalf of individuals in immigration detention and brings FOIA lawsuits to promote government transparency on a range of immigration issues. Cassandra spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about her organization.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, Al Otro Lado, I understand, means “on the other side.” What is the significance of that? How do you describe your organization's main goals?
Cassandra Lopez: Well, we provide services to people on both sides of the border. So we're based here in San Diego, where I'm located, and in Los Angeles in Southern California, and then we also have offices in Tijuana and Mexico City. And we're really aiming to provide legal services to people that are facing detention and deportation in the United States, and then people that are migrants or have been deported and are on the Mexico side of the border.
So, we provide no-cost legal services and humanitarian assistance to people on both sides of the border, and who are affected by the really cruel US immigration policies. And our goal is to see freedom of movement and dignity in migration without the need for constant legal intervention to demand that basic human rights be upheld.
Kolhatkar: Is the fact that Al Otro Lado works on both sides of the borders part of what makes it unique? We have so many immigrant rights groups in the United States, but it seems as though most of them focus on immigrant rights for those people while they're here in the United States, and they don't really often have the capacity, or maybe they just keep their goals narrow and don't as much follow folks if and when they might be deported. Is the uniqueness of your organization the fact that it's cross-border?
Lopez: Yes, I think that is one aspect of our work that makes us unique. So we are, as I said, providing legal services to people that are facing deportation or detention here in the United States, but then we're also aiming to provide services and support migrants that are either stranded on the Mexican side of the border because of our asylum policies, say, or people that have been deported and need assistance or support reintegrating into Mexico, or perhaps are deported to Mexico but are from another country and need services and support while they're in Mexico.
And we really aim to provide services on both sides of the border, and we have lawyers in Mexico that work for the organization that can provide legal services in Mexico, and then also can serve individuals that are still located in the United States.
FEATURING RACHEL MEADE SMITH - While the federal government’s latest jobs report concludes that 4.3% of the workforce is unemployed, the official statistics hide the fact that millions of Americans are struggling.
According to areportearlier this year from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), more than a quarter of the nation’s workforce is “functionally unemployed.” In other words, they are either unemployed, trying to find employment, or are earning poverty wages.
Job seeking has become a full time job for many. And in an age where predatory capitalism continues to make billionaires richer while the rest of us struggle on the margins, the work of seeking work becomes a dystopian in-between place.
That existence, all-too-commonplace now, is captured in a fascinating new book calledSearch Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt, edited by Rachel Meade Smith, a writer, editor, and civic design worker focused on information access and the world of work. Since 2016, she’s authoredWords of Mouth, a free newsletter sharing opportunities for good work and creative expansion, reaching tens of thousands of readers across the globe. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about her book.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I first found out about you watching a podcast that you did with OR Books, your publisher, and it was kind of terrifying how much I could relate to the conversations you were happening. I had been full-time employed until last year when the media outlet I worked for went out of business, just couldn't make ends meet, and I joined the ranks of the self-employed, the hustlers, the freelancers, cobbling together a living wage, barely, and constantly on the edge of security, worrying that one of my gigs will fall through.
And I realized that I am not alone, that there are so many others like me. And let me begin by asking you about your own situation. It sounds like, from reading your background, you too were in this place where you couldn't really find a satisfying job, and you sort of created your own work by writing this newsletter that luckily has become very well-received. Give us a little background of how you came to this.
Rachel Meade Smith: Sure. So, I started sending my newsletter when I actually was fully employed but really hating my job because I was looking for work so much. So I was finding all of these roles, and I wanted to send them out to all of the people in my life who were also looking for work. And then that just kind of continued even as I found jobs and lost jobs and looked for new jobs. I was always doing this newsletter kind of in the background. And around end of 2019, I decided to leave a job that I was very unhappy in, and move into a freelance career. Although I didn't call it a career at the time because career sounded too permanent for what I was doing, which was really just taking a leap of faith and getting out of a situation I didn't want to be in anymore.
"The best thing that unions can do is withhold their labor. That's what people in Italy are doing. Three million people went on that general strike." -- Chris Smalls, labor leader speaking on a panel about Palestine. Unlock the full panel by subscribing.
FEATURING CHRISTIAN SMALLS & NIDAL RAFEEDIE - On Saturday May 9, hundreds of people gathered at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles for an evening insolidarity with Palestineorganized by radio station, KPFK. Part of that event included a panel that Sonali Kolhatkar moderated on labor and Palestine featuring panelists, Chris Smalls and Nidal Rafeedie.
A NOTE TO MY SUBSCRIBERS: I hope you've been enjoying the content I produce each week. Being an independent journalist can be a lonely prospect. But knowing that thousands of you are reading, enjoying, and finding inspiration in my work, keeps me going. Thanks to those of you who pay for this content, I can continue to keep producing quality solutions journalism on a shoestring budget. As a one-woman TV/radio producer, you geta BIG BANG for your buck.Forless than it costs to buy a cup of coffee per month ($4!)you can sustain a program that aspires to change how we think about our world, our economic systems, our movements for justice, and ultimately, our collective future. Thank you!Sonali Kolhatkar
Chris Smalls is one of the most prominent new labor organizers in the nation today, and rose to fame for his role in co-founding the Amazon Labor Union. He has traveled internationally and all over the US, not only fighting for labor rights but for justice for Palestinians in the face of Israel’s genocide. Just days before he spoke at the KPFK panel in LA, he Chris was arrested by police outside the MET Gala where he protested Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Chris’s new book is calledWhen the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class, to be published June 2.
Alongside Chris was Nidal Rafeedie, a Palestinian American labor leader, Vice President of Teamsters Local 1932, and Director of Respiratory Care at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, in San Bernardino County. Local 1932 represents more than 14,000 public sector workers across the Inland Empire, and in October 2024 became one of the first U.S. Teamsters locals to publicly call for an immediate ceasefire and a halt to U.S. military aid fueling the assault on Gaza.
Special thanks to KPFK for organizing and recording this panel.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Palestinian labor unionists have, for a very long time, been calling on organized labor all around the world, have led the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, and have continued to call on labor to use their labor power to stop Israel's excesses, to stop Israeli crimes. And since 2023, October 7th, the call has only been amplified.
So, I want to spend the majority of this panel having my panelists speak. They're the experts on this, and I'll throw out the question to the two of you. I do solutions journalism, and so I'm always looking at where are people doing things that work, and how can those be replicated? And so we've seen in Europe, we've seen European unions bring their nations to a standstill. We've seen that in countries like Italy and Spain. Last year in particular, there were mass union movements that brought everybody out into the streets, brought their countries to a standstill, and spoke out. And of course, we need that more here than in Europe, given the connection between the US and Israel.
So, what is it about European unions that you think has worked for them? Why hasn't it worked here? And what can be done to get American unions and organized labor to rise up in solidarity for Palestine?
Christian Smalls: Man, that's a great question. Thank you all for being here. It's an honor and pleasure to always come back to LA, which is like my second home, so thank you all. Appreciate it. And that's a loaded question, but you know what? I have the perfect answer because, if you've been following the work I've been doing for the last nine months since I've been released from prison in occupied Palestine, the first thing I did was come to LA, and we did a protest downtown, if y'all remember that, and it was about disarming genocide. This campaign that I created is continuing to help support the dock workers in Italy who've shown exactly what we do when we withhold our labor.
So what you're alluding to is the fact that European unions are not tied to a two-party duopoly like we are in America. They're actually communist unions and socialist unions, and that is one reason why they're able to be more militant, because they still uphold those values. Unfortunately, here, our unions vote blue no matter who, or even worse. Yes. So because they're tied to either party, both parties, they're constrained to the type of politics that our politicians are alluding to when it comes to Palestine. So that's one way to look at it.
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FEATURING RICHARD TRENT -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Richard Trent, Executive Director ofMain Street Alliancejoins us. He has a long history of fundraising and organizing for progressive causes. Main Street Alliance is a national network of 30,000 small business owners organizing to reclaim economic and political power for local communities.
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Sonali Kolhatkar: Let me first ask you to explain a little bit more about Main Street Alliance. We often hear politicians tout these words, "Well, yes, we are worried about Wall Street, but what about Main Street?" And it's become this word or phrase that has referenced mom-and-pop businesses. How do you describe this alliance to people who've never heard of it?
Richard Trent: So small businesses are the thing that make communities worth living in, places worth visiting, and they're unbelievably special and crucial for contributing to the dynamism of the spaces that we inhabit. But small business owners haven't ever really been organized for economic or political purposes in super intentional ways.
I'm saying this with a clear understanding of the fact that the chamber system is quite well-known. The issue is that the chamber system really speaks for some of its largest members when shaping policy and advocating. But the fact of the matter is 80% plus of small businesses in this country are actually really, really small, surviving on less than $200,000 in revenue.
And so that means that there's a different issue set that needs to be addressed when dealing with the vast majority of the small business owners in our country that really contribute to our local economies.
"In order to have a fair legislative response [to the Supreme Court's gutting of the VRA], we need fair maps so that we can elect people who will restore the Voting Rights Act in its fullness. It's sort of a chicken and an egg problem, isn't it?" asks Sonali Kolhatkar. Unlock the full interview to see the answer to this question.
FEATURING KIMBERLY SMITHERMAN & DAVID DALEY - The United States Supreme Court in late April issued a sweeping 6-3 ruling in the case ofLouisiana v. Callais, effectively gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. All six conservative justices voted in favor of a Republican challenge to Louisiana’s current district maps that ensured at least two Black voting blocs. Republicans have long attempted to dilute the voting power of people of color by drawing demographically favorable maps and ensuring disproportionately white and Republican representation.
In an unusual move, the court alsoexpeditedthe implementation of its decision, forgoing the usual 32-day delay, so that Louisiana can redraw its maps ahead of its primary election.
In a 4-pagedissent, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson excoriated her colleagues on the court, calling the decision “unwarranted and unwise,” and accusing them of impartiality. And, Justice Elena Kagan, in herdissent, reminded her fellow justices of the VRA’s history, saying, “[The Voting Rights Act] was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers.”
Kimberly Smitherman is the Founding Partner and CEO of Foot Soldiers Park and David Daley is a senior fellow at FairVote and the author of Antidemocratic: Inside the Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, a history of John Roberts, the Supreme Court and the Voting Rights Act. They spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what the Supreme Court decision could impact voters of color.
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Sonali Kolhatkar: Kimberly, let me begin with you. I think 61 years ago feels like a really long time, but it's actually not that long. There's plenty of people still alive today who remember what it looked like, what it felt to spill their blood, as Elena Kagan was saying, to achieve the Voting Rights Act. Remind us of that history, particularly where you are, of the struggle, just briefly, the pain and the struggle of achieving that act.
Kimberly Smitherman: So yeah, it's a really devastating blow to us. Doing the work that I do, founding Foot Soldiers Park with child marching activist Ms. Joanne Bland, it really gives me a different perspective and lived experience of what the marchers, the foot soldiers, the Union soldiers, had to go through for us to get the rights to vote. Those who organized, marched, fought, bled for us to have the rights that we have today.
We like to say ordinary people did extraordinary things for us to have the right to vote. And for us to know that for years they've been continuously fighting to continue to dilute our vote, to take our vote, is really devastating for me, and it's really devastating for the foot soldiers. And I just feel like we have to continue to do the work to ensure that we are educating, activating, continuing to march, continuing to fight, and continuing to vote in order to fulfill and preserve that legacy of those foot soldiers.
"What we need is a rank-and-file militant union labor movement in the United States, like what we had in the 1880s. They were led by immigrants. Like me and my brother Jose here. We're both sons of immigrants. We need to take back our unions." -- Big Will, IWW, Teamsters.
FEATURING MAY DAY ACTIVISTS - Tens of thousands of people showed up for May Day marcheslast Friday May 1st. The “May Day Strong” coalition, which released a detailed “Affordability Agenda” ahead of the events, announced 5,000 marches in cities across the United States.
May Day is traditionally celebrated as a holiday around the world, and is referred to as International Workers’ Day. The inspiration for the commemoration lies in Chicago’s Haymarket Affair of 1886, a seminal turning point in labor history that led to the adoption of the 8-hour work day. But in the US, the official day marking labor power is in September, where Labor Day has marked the start of the school year and become merely an excuse to shop.
Labor organizers in the US want to change that. In Los Angeles, California where this program is based, two marches took place, at MacArthur Park and in front of City Hall. Rising Up host Sonali Kolhatkar attended the City Hall event in Downtown LA and spoke with some of the activists who had gathered there in this special edition of our on-going series, Rising Up in the Streets.
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Activists chanting:Brick by brick. Brick by brick. Wall by wall. Wall by wall. All these empires will fall. All these empires will fall.
Hamid Khan: My name is Hamid Khan. I'm with Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and I'm here today to celebrate International Workers' Power. Today is May Day. It's such a historic day, and it's so deeply connected to the work we do at Stop LAPD Spying Coalition as well because before there was the FBI, before there was the NSA, before there was this whole infrastructure, the Red Squads were formed in Chicago, and that was directly related to what happened at Haymarket Square in 1886.
So that's why we're here, just to build that collective power, to disrupt the system, to build that power towards the abolition of this diseased body and this toxic system that we live in. So that's why I'm here.
Sonali Kolhatkar: The history of May Day is so disconnected from most Americans' consciousness. And that, I think, is by design, right? We get Labor Day off in September, and most people are working today, although there's a pretty good showing of folks who I suppose chose not to work. But why is that important to recover that history?
Khan: First of all, just the purpose for what happened at Haymarket Square over 140 years ago, that was a fight for eight-hour workday. That's why people had come together. That's why workers had come together, all working-class people, over the years and years of abuse and suffering the exploitation. So, I think it's now that people take it for granted. The message is to take a step back, that you're there, you're enjoying your lunch break, you're enjoying your workday, you're enjoying your 9:00 to 5:00.
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FEATURING BOB DEANS -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Bob Deans, the senior strategic advisor for theNatural Resources Defense Council, joins us. Bob is the former president of the White House Correspondents Association and has authored or co-written four NRDC books on climate, the political attack on the environment and the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Bob spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what it means to defend Earth's natural resources.
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Sonali Kolhatkar: The organization's name, Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, hints at what it's about, but how do you explain to people that you've just met what it is that NRDC does? What are its main goals?
Bob Deans: Sonali, we have one mission. It's very simple, and it's to protect the natural world as if our very lives depend on it, because they do. And our work is very much grounded in bedrock American principles, government by the consent of the governed, pursuit of equity and justice, the rule of law, sound science, and our determination to leave our children a livable world, a world, in fact, better than the one that we found.
And it's a very challenging moment for this because today, these ideals, these principles, are under attack by a radical political agenda unlike we've ever seen. So, we're doing everything we can to stand up to that agenda and to set the table for further progress in the future.
"You really want to get a core group of organizers that are completely dedicated to the cause...You have to study labor law. You have to go on the National Labor Relations Board website...Study what you can and cannot do as far as your campaign goes. You want to find yourself a labor lawyer." - Derrick Palmer on how to start your own union. Unlock this full interview to read the transcript and watch the video in full.
FEATURING DERRICK PALMER - The retail giant Amazon announced more than$200 billion in quarterly salesin its latest figures to investors. The company has become a massive monopoly,employing more people worldwidethan any other company with the exception of Walmart. For years, workers attempted to unionize Amazon. Today, Amazon Labor Union, whose co-founder has written amanifestofor modern-day union organizing, explains how he and his fellow workers bested Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Derrick Palmer is the vice president and cofounder of theAmazon Labor Union, which, in 2021, successfully unionized an Amazon warehouse for the first time in the company’s history. He lives in Staten Island, New York, and continues to work as an employee at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse there. His new book is calledHandbook for the Revolution: Building a Union for the Twenty First Century. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about his new book.
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Sonali Kolhatkar: Now, you say in your book that you never started out thinking that you would be a labor leader and an organizer. What was your breaking point? What led you from anger into activation after you'd already been working at Amazon for a number of years?
Derrick Palmer: Oh, that's a good question. I feel like honestly, it was built up for a while. Just my experience being at Amazon, because first off, I started off at a New Jersey warehouse before I transferred to Staten Island, and it was like mirror image. The same crazy working conditions. The rates system was very harsh, and it allowed workers to create their own little culture there, if that makes sense. Everyone was against what Amazon was doing, and I was one of them. But it was really at that point where I was just complaining and not really doing anything about it.
And I think gradually, as I started working at Amazon, I became more of a leader because people gravitated towards me because I started to speak out, and I started to speak out against management and the way the system is built. And what really set the tone for organizing was really in the pandemic. The pandemic when New York was the epicenter. We had the most cases in the United States, and a lot of people were getting sick, and we didn't even have the proper equipment in the facility, and there was no social distancing implemented. There was no type of policies or anything in regards to COVID.
"There's really a question around wherever you are, if you're in a school, if you're in a corporation, if you're at a university or in a school district, look at that organization and just do your own kind of informal swamp audit," says Steve Phillips. Learn what a "swamp audit" is by clicking on the link below to upgrade your subscription!
FEATURING STEVE PHILLIPS - President Donald Trump’s central domestic agenda appears to be reversing gains made by proponents of racial equality and ensuring minority rule by white men remains intact. Indismantlingfederal Diversity- Equity-Inclusion initiatives, encouraging white men tosuefor racial discrimination, and exclusively welcomingwhite South Africansinto the nation via the refugee program, he has been overt about his racist, sexist agenda. Steve Phillips has coined a new term for Trump’s white supremacist patriarchy and says it’s time to go on the offense.
Phillips is a columnist for The Guardian and The Nation. He is also the host of the podcast, “Democracy in Color with Steve Phillips,” and the founder of the political media organization,Democracy in Color. He is author of The New York Times bestseller Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and the national bestselling book How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good. His latest book is,Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America.Steve spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about his latest book.
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Sonali Kolhatkar: It's so good to have you back with your latest book. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. And so, the subtitle for your book is important, "Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America."
Let's start with how over-represented white men really are in positions of power. If you listen to Trump and his allies, it seems as though white men are just being pushed out of everywhere, and they are the ones facing the most discrimination. How untrue is that?
Steve Phillips: Right. Well, it's important to start with the baseline, right? That white men, by the latest census data, are 29% of the US population. And so that's the baseline in terms of determining what is their representation in all of these other different sectors of society. And so, you could start with, presidents of the United States, all have been men, all but one have been white men. Ninety percent of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, 90% of the companies that receive venture capital startup funding, around 80% of the United States Senate.
And then across the board in local organizations, college presidents, senior faculty on different campuses, most of the positions of power, influence, and decision-making in our society are held by white men, and they're certainly held by white men in significantly over-representative numbers than their numbers in the population.
"I'm never going to be hard on someone for changing their view in favor of more progressive taxation," says Emily Eisner of Fiscal Policy Institute. "I think it's laudable that Governor Hochul has shifted towards wanting to ask high earners and extremely wealthy people to pay into providing the services that make New York City and New York State a great place to live." Listen to what else Hochul is doing in NY by upgrading your subscription below!
FEATURING EMILY EISNER - New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, together with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, has proposed a newtaxon nonresident second-home owners in the city. The so-called Pied-a-Terre tax is a surcharge on homes valued at $5 million or more, owned by people who don’t live in the city year-round. While the tax has wealthy homeowners up in arms, some tax experts say it doesn’t go far enough to address the city’s major budgetary shortfall.
Emily Eisner is the Acting Executive Director and Chief Economist at theFiscal Policy Instituteand spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what the tax entails and how additional taxes are required.
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Sonali Kolhatkar: What is this tax? I gave the broad outlines of it. A lot of people who own second, third homes in New York City aren't having it, don't like it. How badly would it actually impact them, if we should even have that as a consideration, but what exactly is that tax?
Emily Eisner: Yeah. Some of the details of the tax haven't been ironed out yet. I think that the mayor and the governor are in negotiations over this. What we do know is that they're aiming to raise a total of about $500 million from the tax overall, and they expect to tax about 10,000 to 15,000 units. Keep in mind that these are units that are worth... By units, I mean apartments that are worth more than $5 million at the market rate. So, these are people who own $5 million apartments as their second homes, or third, or fourth.
So, I don't expect this to be a high enough tax for people to feel a budget strain. And as you sort of said in your introduction, $500 million is about a 10th of the budget gap that New York City has. So, this is not really that large a proposal in the grand scheme of things.
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FEATURING MESSIAH RAMKISSOON -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Messiah Ramkissoon joins us. He serves as Deputy Executive Director atYouth Justice Network(YJN), a City nonprofit supporting 16–24-year-olds affected by Rikers Island and other detention facilities. Messiah spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what justice for people impacted by incarceration looks like.
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Messiah Ramkissoon: Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I'm in Southern California on the opposite end of the country as you. You're in New York. For those of us who are outside New York, Rikers Island is notorious. It is basically the largest jail in New York City, and I understand is going to be, at least planned to be, closed by next year. Tell me about Youth Justice Network and its relationship to those people who have been held at Rikers Island.
Ramkissoon: Sure. So, Youth Justice Network, we were actually founded on Rikers Island 35 years ago under the name Friends of Island Academy. At that time, you had an overflowing jail of teenagers and young adults who were inundating the facilities on Rikers Island. And I'm talking of age 16 to 21-year-olds. And these young people were being released and going home to the community, but there was nothing for them when they came home, right? There were no safety nets to support young people.
The post-release, the services at that time, 35 years ago, for folks leaving incarceration were exclusive to adults. And so, while young people were overpopulating the jail system within New York City, there was no intervention, and so, they would come home and recidivate and come back to Rikers, and get sentenced to face football numbers, unfortunately, or they would come home and unfortunately die in the streets.
The Latinx and Asian immigrant women sewing many of your clothes are organizing ahead of Olympics 2028.Unlock this interview to hear the innovative worker-led efforts to make it a more just industry.
FEATURING DAISY GONZALEZ - Los Angeles is home to the nation’s largest garment manufacturing industries, employing about 45,000 workers, disproportionately Latino and Asian immigrants. It is LA’s largest manufacturing sector, generating more than a billion dollars in revenue annually.
In recent years, the industry and its workers have been hard hit, from the COVID-19 pandemic toICE raidsunder Donald Trump’s regime. How have garment workers been organizing for their rights in increasingly dire conditions?
Daisy Gonzalez is the Campaigns Director at theGarment Worker Center. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about GWC's organizing efforts.
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Sonali Kolhatkar: Thanks for joining us. First, tell me a little bit about the workers themselves. I gave a few statistics. We're talking about tens of thousands of workers. People who live in LA know about the Fashion District. And there's, of course, lots of factories and manufacturing centers in Los Angeles itself, and many people assume that most of their clothes come from China or elsewhere, but LA manufactures and actually creates a lot of clothing. Who are the workers?
Daisy Gonzalez: That's exactly it. You're right. Most people think their clothing is being produced 100% abroad, but Los Angeles has the largest garment manufacturing hub in the United States.
Workers are skilled workers with 20 to 30 years of experience. We're talking about workers from Latin America, from Asia, that are producing clothing for major brands that we're buying in retail stores across the country.
And unfortunately, one of the biggest issues that we continue to see in this industry is the issue of wage theft. So, workers are often paid a couple of cents per seam or per operation that they conduct on an article of clothing. And it doesn't matter how quickly these incredibly skilled workers can do their work, they continue to get paid well below the minimum wage.
But yeah, we are the Garment Worker Center, and we organize these workers and really take their lead on what is necessary to improve their working conditions. And we're a membership-based organization, so we are led by our membership and these workers that we are talking about today.
"Right now, facilities are being planned to be opened up in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our backyards," says Nanci Palacios of Detention Watch Network. Find out how people are fighting back.
FEATURING NANCI PALACIOS - Immigrants held in federal detention centers are dying in higher numbers than ever before under President Donald Trump. This year alone, of the 60-70,000 people being imprisoned in prison-like facilities across the nation,17 peoplehave died according to numbers released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since Trump’s second term began, a total of47 peoplehave died in federal custody.
This weekend, a group of national organizations has called for a “Communities Not Cages National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention.” On Saturday April 25, more than 160 actions will take place against detention center expansions around the country.
Nanci Palacios is the Organizing and Membership Director atDetention Watch Network, leading national campaigns to end immigration detention and build a world where all people can live freely and without fear. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the April 25th National Day of Action.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, first let's talk about the deaths, the very disturbing deaths. I think the last time that this many people died in detention was when ICE was first formed in the early 2000s in the wake of the September 11th attacks. I suppose it's no surprise. Are we talking about the rate of people going up or the sheer numbers simply because so many people are being imprisoned by Trump?
Nanci Palacios: Yeah, I think it's both, right? I think the increased amount of people that are being detained has rapidly increased under this administration, resulting in more people being held in detention, crowded in a lot of these detention facilities. And we already know that ICE leads to deadly actions. We have seen those numbers be increasingly at the largest amount ever last year, with over deaths, and just in the four months of this year, we have seen already deaths.
"I have to question, if I were blonde haired and blue eyed, sitting there facing 10 years, would have gotten that 10 year sentence" on cannabis-related charges, asks Stephanie Shepard. Unlock the full interview by upgrading now.
FEATURING STEPHANIE SHEPARD - Since 2014, when Colorado and Washington decriminalized recreational cannabis, the movement to legalize what was once considered a dangerous and illegal drug hasgrown rapidly. While cannabis remains illegal under federal law, 24 states and the District of Columbia no longer criminalize marijuana possession. Yet, many people who were imprisoned over marijuana-related charges in the past remain behind bars. According to theLast Prisoner Project, the number is about 40,000 people in federal and state prisons combined.
Stephanie Shepard is executive director ofLast Prisoner Project, a nonprofit working to redress the harms of cannabis criminalization through legal intervention, education and criminal justice reform advocacy. She served a ten-year sentence for a nonviolent, first-time cannabis offense. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about her organization's efforts this 4/20 to change a system that continues to hold people in prison on cannabis-related charges.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, Monday of this week was April 20th, 4/20. It was a day that a lot of people around the country sort of celebrated increasing decriminalization of cannabis. It's a day that's ripe for social media posts, et cetera. And yet, organizations like yours used that day to draw attention to the fact that there's still 40,000 people serving sentences for an offense that is considered in at least something like half the states of the country to not be criminal anymore. Tell me about this very large number. It was actually larger than I was expecting, 40,000 people. How did you even arrive at that number? Is it known that that is the actual number?
Stephanie Shepard: We don't know if that's the actual number. Early on, we did some research, and from what we could see, 40,000 on the state and federal level was about right. But because the system is so antiquated, there is no real way to give, at any point in time, an exact number. But we have our guesstimations based on our records and our research and our constituency that there's roughly 3,000 people, between 2,800 and 3,000 people incarcerated for cannabis on the federal level, and the remainder of that's on the state level.
But a lot of times what'll happen is you'll be there for cannabis, but they'll just list it as “drugs.” So, there's a lot of different nuances that needs to happen to exactly give an exact number. But it could possibly be more. We don't know, based off of the information given from the BOP and the Department of Corrections.
Kolhatkar: And I imagine these are disproportionately Black and Brown people.
Shepard: Yes. Black and Brown people, four to five times more likely to be arrested for cannabis and have it result in a longer sentence. It's very difficult to reconcile for myself, having a first-time, victimless cannabis conspiracy charge and it resulting in 10 years of my life plus five years’ probation.
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FEATURING JESSE RABINOWITZ -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Jesse Rabinowitz, Campaign and Communications Director at theNational Homelessness Law Centerjoins us. He leads the Housing, Not Handcuffs Campaign, bringing together local, state, and federal partners to fight against laws that make it a crime to live outside and push for housing and other proven solutions to homelessness. Previously, he was the Senior Manager for Policy and Advocacy at Miriam’s Kitchen, a DC-based nonprofit working to end long-term homelessness. Jesse spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what it takes to end homelessness.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, tell me first about what the National Homelessness Law Center's main goals are. Obviously, you center unhoused people and deal with the fact that we do have this crisis around the country. The campaign that you are working on gives an indication of what it is you're most interested in, Housing Not Handcuffs. But lay it out for us what the main goals of the organization are. It is a law center, which suggests there's litigation involved.
Jesse Rabinowitz: Certainly. We use many tools in our toolbox, including litigation, policy, advocacy, communications, all to build a country where everyone has a safe place to live and nobody is forced to sleep outside. We really want a country where nobody is struggling to choose between paying rent and paying for groceries or paying for medicine, because we know that we have enough resources as a country to ensure that everybody has the housing and supports they need to thrive.
Kolhatkar: So, in looking at this crisis, it's huge. It's a large nation. We have states. And each region's challenges might be different based on geography or local policies or state-level policies, and of course, overlying all of that are federal policies. How do you address the goals? Where do you focus? Is it a case-by-case, region-by-region approach, or do you mostly focus on federal policy?
Rabinowitz: It's really all of the above. Right now, we're seeing a far-right wing billionaire-backed think tank called the Cicero Institute partner or ally itself with the Trump administration to pass their racist, backwards, and frankly, ineffective solutions to homelessness that focus on jails and arrests and forcing people off of the streets. And we're seeing these right-wing billionaires peddle their lies, both at the federal level, but also at the city and state level.
So, we are conscious of the fact that there is a well-funded billionaire-backed push to make it a crime to be homeless happening in cities and states and in Washington, DC and across the country, and we're working to use every lever in our toolbox to fight back and say the solution to homelessness has and never will be arresting people or fining people for being poor. The solution to homelessness has and remains getting folks the housing and support they need.
"I think the media can be the greatest force for peace on Earth. Instead, all too often, it's wielded as a weapon of war, which is why we have to take the media back." -- Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! Watch Amy reflect on her 30+ years of journalism, highlighted in a new documentary hitting theaters now.
FEATURING AMY GOODMAN - More than three decades ago, a scrappy radio station, WBAI Pacifica Radio in New York, became the birthplace ofDemocracy Now!a pioneering politics and news show that centered people over profits, human rights over advertisers, and justice over business-as-usual.
The show, hosted and produced by Amy Goodman and a small army of intrepid journalists, broke boundaries, challenged corporate media, and is now the focus of a new documentary,Steal this Story, Please. The film, releasing in theaters nationwide, traces several milestones in Goodman’s coverage from the controversial airing of commentaries by political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, to a massacre in East Timor, the September 11th attacks and subsequent war on Iraq, through to the emergence of Donald Trump.
Amy Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and host and executive producer ofDemocracy Now!, which airs on more than 1,500 public television and radio stations worldwide. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the new documentary, Steal This Story, Please.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Amy, I want to begin by letting you know that when I first considered hosting a show on KPFK Pacifica in Los Angeles, it was listening to "Democracy Now!" that gave me the courage to do what I ended up doing. I listened to you, and I figured out that all I needed was a thirst for truth and justice. So, thank you for that. What does the title of this film, "Steal This Story, Please," mean? Let's start there.
Amy Goodman: Well, Sonali, it means so much to me that you said "Democracy Now!" inspired you because I respect your work so much, both on "Rising Up" and "Uprising" before that. "Steal the story, please" is our motto at "Democracy Now!" We consider an exclusive a failure. We want the media to pick up our stories.
To, yes, steal these stories and take them out to the wider world in the same way that we don't expect people will just come to "Democracy Now!" We go out on all social media platforms, from Instagram to YouTube, to X, to wherever, to ensure that wherever people are, that's where we have to be able to get these different voices out.
"One of our three demands on May Day is no ICE, no war, and no private armies for authoritarian power. We know that none of us are free until all of us are free. And we also know that allowing the genocide in Gaza to take place under a Democratic administration greased the wheels for fascism domestically." - Saqib Bhatti.Upgrade now to listen to this powerful interview!
FEATURING SAQIB BHATTI - The New York Times on Tuesday published an editorial titled “Here’s How to Defeat Trumpism.” The piece reflected on Peter Magyar’s earthshattering win over Viktor Orban in Hungary, a dictator Donald Trump has long admired. The paper maintained “the Democratic Party’s need to develop an ambitious agenda that goes far beyond criticizing Mr. Trump and charts an alternative vision for the country.” And then, it went on to denounce the “social progressivism that dominates elite left-leaning circles and alienates many voters.”
With such sentiments dominating corporate news media, a mass mobilization led by grassroots organizations aims to bring millions of people onto American streets on May 1st. TheMay Day Strongcoalition has a clear agenda: “tax the rich… No ICE. No war. No private army serving authoritarian power. Expand democracy. Hands off our vote.”
Saqib Bhatti, Co-Founder and Executive Director of theAction Center on Race & the Economyis part of the May Day Strong coalition and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the motivation behind the mobilization.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I'm wondering what you make of this argument that we hear over and over again, essentially, what the left has been saying for a very long time, if the Democrats want to win, they need to go far beyond, "We're not Trump. Please vote for us." Right? Hillary Clinton said, "Vote for me because I'm not Trump." Essentially that's what Kamala Harris said. And neither of them articulated a clear agenda that showed how they would be different from Trump.
And it seems as though TheNew York Times kind of got close and then backed away and talked about elite left-leaning circles. I've never come across such elite left-leaning circles. I don't know if you have.
Saqib Bhatti: I have. I think The New York Times is it. Right? I think the key thing is that the Democratic elites, the party insiders, have fundamentally failed to understand that everything that they have been doing is what has brought us where we are now. The fact that the Democratic Party turned away from working families, the fact that they chose to become the party for Wall Street and corporate America, just fundamentally seeded the working class to the right. Just played a huge role in the rise of Trump.
The failure of Democrats to advance a bold agenda that spoke to people's needs is what led them to turn to Trump out of desperation in many cases, because they couldn't make ends meet. And that's what we're trying to do with May Day Strong, is figure out how we're actually developing an agenda and fighting for an agenda that speaks to the needs of Black folks, Latinx folks, immigrants, working-class folks, poor white folks. We know that we need to actually speak directly to the economic interests of everyone in the country in a way that the Democrats have refused to do. And The New York Times has been a cheerleader in everything they've been doing up to this point.
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FEATURING COURTNEY HOSTETLER -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Courtney Hostetler, the Legal Director atFree Speech For Peoplejoins us. Courtney leads legal strategies to protect voting rights and defend U.S. democracy. She has extensive experience advancing accountability and constitutional protections through impact litigation and advocacy at the state and federal levels. Courtney spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the need for activism to build a better democracy.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: It seems as though protecting our Constitution and bettering the health of our democracy is more important than ever before. I know we always feel that way, but the stakes seem to have gotten higher and higher and higher. And you and I are speaking at a time when we have a president who is basically snatching and grabbing as much dictatorial, authoritarian power as he can. In such a context, explain the work that Free Speech For People does, what its main goals are.
Courtney Hostetler: Sure. So going back to the beginning a little bit, we began as an organization committed to getting big money out of politics, and that's still a cornerstone of what we do. Because the billions of dollars that are pouring into our elections coming from corporations and billionaires, entities both that built empires off the backs of people, and of course, the legal theories that the courts have accepted allowing this to happen, it's all an affront to our Constitution and a real threat to our democracy, and absolutely steps that led to the position we're currently in.
Because big money forced open the doors of our democracy to corruption, both of the quid pro quo variety, but also to that general corruption that occurs when our elected officials aren't beholden to the people but are beholden to the big money that's being thrown at their campaigns. And it has effectively silenced people without money and made them feel as if they are outside a system that is not built for or by them, which is the opposite of what our country was intended to do.
So that's where we started, but as you rightly noted in the beginning, we are in such a moment, in this attack on our democracy. Over time, we've expanded to other areas of work, including fighting for free and fair elections. It means fighting against voter suppression and voter intimidation, fighting against political disinformation, fighting for accountability in government, particularly for our Supreme Court and our executive branch, Trump and the people within his cabinet.
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FEATURING DR. JUDY LUBIN -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.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Thank you so much for joining us. Now, on your website, it says that the Center for Urban and Racial Equity, or CURE, "Partners with people and organizations to advance equity through policy systems, institutional, and community change." So, that sounds a little formal and official. Give me the person-to-person version, the more detailed version of how you summarize the work your organization does, including the main issues you work on, which are, of course, racial equity.
Dr. Judy Lubin: Yes. Good question. So, CURE sits in between organizations and institutions and government that have resources and power and that are wanting to do better with communities. And so, we sit between those types of groups and community-based organizations and people in community that are wanting to make change. And we serve as a bridge, essentially translating.
We're rooted in community. We bring a healing-centered approach to our work, which is why other organizations come to us. And so, we serve as a bridge so that when there are equity initiatives, efforts to change systems and structures, that that work is able to be sustained, and the deep healing-centered work that needs to happen within communities and with communities actually happens in a way that moves us towards more sustainable change and transformation.
Kristin Powell calls on Black people to take the latest Black Census. "This is our nation, despite the fact that this nation has been anti-Black in how we've experienced it, and it really is our vision for this country that is going to make it a country that is best for everyone," she says.
FEATURING KRISTIN POWELL - The Trump Administration’s Equal Opportunity Employment Commission recently sent aletterto Fortune 500 companies warning against hiring employees with the goal of increasing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The EEOC office has been accusing institutions of discrimination against white people and is currently investigating Nike for anti-white bias.
As we come upon the sixth anniversary of the historic racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis, the Black Futures Lab is readying a launch of its thirdBlack Census Project.
Kristin Powell is the Executive Director ofBlack Futures LabandBlack to the Future Action Fund, which exists to advance Black grassroots and political power. With over a decade of community organizing experience, she has led winning justice campaigns and developed organizers nationwide. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the thirdBlack Census.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, it seems so bizarre that we have a federal government today that is doing its best to not just reverse course on the advances, the modest advances that were made toward racial justice, but is actively promoting white people, very explicitly throwing its weight behind affirmative action for white people. But I suppose we shouldn't be terribly surprised. How do you respond to the state of affairs today where the federal government is championing whiteness so overtly?
Kristin Powell: Yeah. I don't think it's bizarre. I think it's the playbook. If you have ever read the book "White Rage" by Carol Anderson, she goes through every point in history where Black people in America, where Black people have made any sort of racial justice progress, there is a white rage backlash that comes in a fury, and we're seeing that again.
We saw that after the Great Migration, we saw that after Reconstruction, we saw it after Brown versus Board of Education, and we're seeing it again. And so even though that is the playbook, it's still infuriating that we have not just a government that is anti-Black, but that doesn't believe it works for its own people, and is escalating fascist policies that is creating a dictatorship that we didn't ask for.
"This is absolutely a win, and we're really excited about it," says Kris Henderson. "And we also know that we still actually have to get people home." Click below to access the FULL interview.
FEATURING KRIS HENDERSON - The State Supreme court of Pennsylvania has juststruck downmandatory life sentences for felony murder convictions. Justices determined that a mandatory life sentence, “absent an assessment of culpability,” violates Pennsylvania’s constitution.
A felony murder conviction doesn’t mean the person convicted is directly responsible for a death, for someone can be convicted of a felony murder even if their actions indirectly and unintentionally resulted in someone’s death. Currently, more than a thousand people are serving such life sentences in Pennsylvania, and more than two thirds of them are Black.
Kris Henderson, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director ofAmistad Law Project. They are a movement lawyer, and a founding member of theCoalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration, and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how the victory was won and what it means.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, before we get into the actual decision itself, let's talk about the person whose case was at the heart of this particular case, who is a man named Derek Lee, who has been serving a life sentence, but whose direct actions did not cause the death that the particular case involved. Tell me about Derek’s story.
Kris Henderson: Yeah. I think that one of the things about felony murder, I think a lot of people don't realize, is that many people did not kill or intend to kill anyone. They were involved in a felony and someone died or was killed at some point during that situation. And then under Pennsylvania law, people have been able to be convicted of felony murder. And in Pennsylvania, up until now, the mandatory minimum has been life without parole for felony murder.
And Mr. Lee was one of these people who was involved in a felony, and someone died over the course of that felony, not as a direct cause of his actions, and still he was serving life without parole for felony murder, or as we call it, death by incarceration.
"There's no question that they underestimated Iran, and that they overestimated US power. I really think that Trump and Hegseth are convinced by their own sense of arrogance and hubris, frankly," says Khury Petersen-Smith in this fascinating conversation.
FEATURING KHURY PETERSEN-SMITH -President Donald Trump is veryupsetthat European nations such as Britain and France have thus far refused to join the US-Israel war on Iran that Europe never asked for. His angry words, “Go get your own oil,” came in the wake of reports that Spain had closed its airspace to US warplanes headed to Iran.
Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to bombIran’s desalination plants, which is civilian infrastructure that millions of Iranians rely on for water. Under international law it is illegal to hit civilian targets in war, but that hasn’t stopped the US and Israel from bombingschools. The Trump administration is now reportedly weighing whether to start aground war in Iran.
Khury Petersen-Smith, Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow and the Co-Director of the New Internationalism Project at theInstitute for Policy Studies. His specialty is U.S. militarism in the Middle East and in the Pacific, and movements that resist it. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the state of the war.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: This war, as I mentioned, nobody asked for other than Israel, seems to have no real clear aim, and Trump has created deadlines and then extended them. He's issued threats. He's claimed Iran is already decimated, and has a two-week timeline for wrapping it up, or two-month timeline for the entire war. Every day it seems as though something different comes up. Can you make sense of it? Is there any rhyme or reason, not that war is ever logical or rational, but can you make any rhyme or reason of Trump's and Netanyahu's aims?
Khury Petersen-Smith: Yeah. It's an important question. I will say that there has been a longstanding desire by a section of the US elite to have a war with Iran, and that includes Donald Trump himself, who as early as said that the US should send troops to Iran in response to the hostage crisis of 1979.
And so, there's this kind of conversation now that this war came out of nowhere. And on one hand it was certainly an unprovoked war, but on the other hand, at least for the past two decades, since the post-9/11 wars, and especially around the US invasion of Iraq, there was a very serious conversation in Washington about invading Iran as well.
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FEATURING EMILY MARTIN -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Emily Martin, Chief Program Officer for theNational Women’s Law Centerjoins us. She leads the development and execution of NWLC’s gender justice priorities, with a particular focus on women and girls of color and LGBTQI+ people. She was previously NWLC’s Vice President for Education & Workplace Justice.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Tell me first what the goals are of the National Women's Law Center. The name certainly suggests a lot, but looking through your website, it's very broad. So how do you define what your main goals are?
Emily Martin: Well, it's a great question. We are a multi-issue gender justice organization. We're focused on law and policy, but also on narrative change. The issues that we focus on include education, workplace justice, reproductive rights and health, childcare, income security, judicial nominations, and democracy, among other things.
So, a whole bunch of issues that are really key to women and LGBTQ people's ability to make decisions about their lives and to thrive. And we work on those issues, we often say that we use the law in all its forms. We really believe that legal change drives culture change, and culture change drives legal change. We engage with Congress, with state legislatures, with the courts.
And we also do a lot of campaign and communications work, both because that's really important for our ability to advance good policies and fight against bad ones, and because, more broadly, sort of helping to shift and shape how people think about gender, how people think about opportunity. What are the stories that we tell ourselves about women and girls and LGBTQ people? That's also sort of key to our ability to advance gender justice.
FEATURING MARCO GUZMAN - Lawmakers in the state of Washington just passed a9.9% tax on yearly incomes of more than a million dollars. The new law, which Gov. Bob Ferguson has promised to sign, would affect about 20,000 households in the state and will become the state’s first income tax. Washington is among nine states nationwide that does not tax incomes, making its reliance on sales and property taxes regressive. Currently the bottom 20% of households pay a higher percentage of their incomes in taxes compared to the wealthiest 1%. The new law is expected to earn the state nearly $4 billion a year.
Marco Guzman is a Senior Analyst at theInstitute on Taxation and Economic Policywhere he provides research and analysis to help support state policymakers across the country. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the newly passed tax and what it means for Washington and other states.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I didn't honestly realize that Washington didn't have an income tax. Before we get into what this new tax is all about, can you give us a sense of how Washington's tax structure has been designed? I gave just a brief outline of it, but how is it that the state has managed to fund the things it needs without an income tax all these years?
Marco Guzman: Yeah. Washington actually did have an income tax in 1932, but the state Supreme Court in 1933 quickly overturned it. They said that they qualified money as being property and said you can only tax property at a uniform rate, and the tax that had passed was a tax on graduated rates, or a graduated rate tax. And so, they quickly overturned that.
So yeah, Washington has been without an income tax since 1933. They do have, again, sales and excise taxes that they levy. They have a business and occupations tax, which is their tax on gross receipts of business income, and then property taxes as well.
So, they do have taxes that they do levy, but no income tax, because it was constitutionally prohibited. So, they've been kind of in a bad spot. They find themselves, as you mentioned, with a very regressive tax system that places much of the tax burden on lower and middle income households than it does folks in the top 1%.
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FEATURING ANDY ROWELL - The US-Israel war on Iran has thrown the oil-based global economy into a tailspin. In retaliation for airstrikes, Iran has beentargeting ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway abutting Iran and Gulf Arab states through which oil tankers pass. Not only is the war sendingoil prices skyrocketing, it’s also impacting the price of transported goods that rely on oil-fueled shipping.
Andy Rowell is an editor forOil Change Internationalin addition to working as a freelance writer and investigative journalist who specializes in environmental, health and lobbying issues. He is an honorary research Research Fellow at the University of Bath and haswrittenabout how the US-Israel war on Iran is highlighting thevulnerabilityof a global oil-based economy. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how a decentralized renewable energy economy could reduce incentives for war.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: You just wrote an article called "Trump and Israel's War on Iran Once Again Exposes the Folly of Fossil Fuel Dependence." So, take us through that logic. Iran is one of the world's major oil producers, but there are plenty of other oil producers as well: Russia, the US also produces its own oil. We have Venezuela. Why is this particular war exposing how dependent the global economy is on this one narrow waterway?
Andy Rowell: Yeah, fundamentally, the oil and gas industry is an international integrated industry. And you might think that consumers in the US, if you listen to President Trump, it's like, "Hey, we're energy independent, and that energy's going to stay in the US." Well, of course it's not. It gets exported. And so, it's a global industry. And a fifth of the world's oil and gas passes through the Strait of Hormuz every single day.
So suddenly, a fifth of that oil has been switched off, that the tankers can't go through. And you've also got the added problem that because of the threats to mainly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that basically they are no longer producing. And so, you've got the world's energy watchdog the International Energy Agency calling this the worst crisis in living memory for the oil and gas industry. This is worse than the ’73 price shock and the 2022 Ukraine war combined.
So, it's complete crisis. And once again, it shows the folly of being... It's nonsensical that you and I, as global consumers, not only is the price of gas rising, but the price of food will rise. And everything is so interlinked because we're so dependent on fossil fuels, and that's this 20 -mile strait of Hormuz.
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FEATURING BRANDON WOLF - Over the past year, two major national mobilizations under the banner of “No Kings” have brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to city streets to protest the dictatorial administration of Donald Trump. Now, the third such mobilization takes place March 28.
Brandon Wolf is an LGBTQ+ civil rights and gun safety advocate, bestselling author, and survivor of the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. He currently serves as National Press Secretary for theHuman Rights Campaign. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what people can expect at the marches.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: How do you assess the success of the first two No Kings mobilization? It's always tough to sort of measure the impact of a gathering because you can't necessarily tell that this or that policy changed because of it, but do you have any measurements to suggest that those two mobilizations that came before were indeed successful?
Brandon Wolf: Yeah, I think I'm most excited by the growth of the No Kings Coalition. Both, the organizations that have been helping to plan events across the country, and also the number of people that have shown up. If you think about it, back in October, there were 7 million people that took to the streets in this country.
And then you saw that energy only continue to grow as people fought back in places like Portland and Minneapolis. You had millions of people turning out to the streets of Minneapolis to push back against ICE occupation of their communities. And that was in the freezing, bitter, maybe even historic cold, for some communities.
When we hosted our Eyes on ICE training, which is teaching people how to spot ICE in their communities and warn others, inform others of what rights they have , 200,000 people showed up for that training on a weeknight, which just tells you how powerful the movement is when it can not just show up in the streets one day, but can sustain that kind of energy over time.
So, if you can imagine 7 million people in the streets in October, you had millions of people on the streets in Minneapolis pushing back against ICE in the bitter cold. You can imagine how large that will be on March 28.
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FEATURING MEDEA BENJAMIN -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Medea Benjamin, one of the founders of the leading antiwar organization,CODEPINKjoins us. Medea has also cofounded Global Exchange and several key antiwar initiatives, including the Peace in Ukraine Coalition and Unfreeze Afghanistan. With 50 years of experience, she is recognized as “one of America’s most committed fighters for human rights.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So first let's talk about the organization's origins. You and I have spoken so many times over the years about the current work that Codepink is doing. Often it's anti-war work. But this conversation, seeks to look at the organization in its entirety. And I remember when Codepink was founded, because I've been doing this long enough, and I remember there was a time when it was called Codepink Women for Peace, or something to that effect, when it was first, founded.
Medea Benjamin: Yes. Well, I go back more than you do, Sonali. But you do go back to the time of the 9/11 attacks, and that was really the origin of Codepink, where there was that George Bush color-coded alert system that, of course young people don't know, but there was that yellow, orange, red alert to keep people constantly in this state of fear and to justify the unprovoked war in Iraq and justify the invasion of Afghanistan.
We came together as a group of women. We were originally an environmental group that came together, and it was during this conference we had that we were talking about ending wars and saying, "You know, we gotta do something about it, and maybe we should come up with our own color-coded alert."
And that's when we came up with a Code Hot Pink, because we were just not pink, we were a hot pink. But that was a URL that was taken by a porn site, so we couldn't be Hot Pink, and we became Codepink.
Thismust-watch videofeatures powerful and creative graphic that an anonymous art collective projects onto the walls city buildings in LA and beyond.Upgrade your subscription to watch now!
FEATURING "KENNY" - An anonymous artists collective in Los Angeles has recently been plastering buildings across the city with powerful graphics that send a strong political message. Except that the images leave no trace, for they are graphic projections of imagery and video.
VjayBombs, as the collective is named, mocks billionaires, politicians, police and especially ICE agents. One of its members going by the name "Kenny," spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the art and what's behind it.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Joining me now is Kenny, one of VjayBombs’ members. To protect his identity, we're obscuring his video feed for our TV audience. Welcome to the program, Kenny.
Kenny: Hi. How you doing?
Kolhatkar: Doing well. Thank you so much for joining us. It is really interesting to see some of these visuals on buildings. I confess I haven't seen them in person, but I've been seeing them online on your Instagram feed and if folks have been showing up to protests in LA, especially in the evenings, they might have seen some of your art. Describe for people who are unfamiliar, people who are outside LA what your art looks like.
Kenny: Yeah, so we go out with a large venue projector and we do a little pop-up art show. Most of our work is kind of in the style of like a stencil. It's very basic animation. Sometimes there's words depending on what we're trying to say.
And we try to project it as big as possible in a lot of different places, sometimes in places with a lot of foot traffic and then sometimes just for ourselves.
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FEATURING IBRAM X KENDI - The authoritarianism on full display in Donald Trump’s second term as president has a very long and sordid history, not just in the United States but all over the world. In a timely and powerful new book, acclaimed historian Ibram X Kendi traces the history of what has been called The Great Replacement theory, to help us understand the domestic turmoil we find ourselves in.
Ibram X Kendi, is one of the world’s foremost historians of racism and a leading antiracist scholar. He is Professor of History at Howard University, and the founding director of the Howard Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning,as well as the international bestseller How to Be an Antiracist, among other titles. He discussed his new book,Chain of Ideas: The Origins of our Authoritarian Agewith Sonali Kolhatkar.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, we have heard of this idea, the “great replacement theory.” I've heard it when I've studied Tucker Carlson's coverage on Fox News, for example. And I mentioned the Trump administration's second term, but really we should even mention the first term when we saw white supremacists marching on streets of American cities. What is the “great replacement theory” for those people who've never heard of it and want to understand what this means in order to meet this moment we are today? How do you define it?
Ibram X Kendi: Sure. First let me say I'm excited to be on your show. And so “great replacement theory” is this notion that there is this conspiracy, particularly that liberal or even progressive elites are apparently facilitating people of color to come and take away the lives, livelihoods, even jobs, or even electoral power of white people.
And it's actually mutated from there in different countries. And so, when we think about it even in a more expansive sense, it's this notion that there's this conspiracy to take the lives, livelihoods, or even power of majority groups through disadvantaged or even minority groups. So, it’s essentially, this idea that minoritized groups or disadvantaged groups are coming to take over.
And the reason why this connects to authoritarianism is because you have these authoritarian politicians who are pushing this idea on majority groups, on privileged groups, saying to them that “your lives are under attack. Your nations are being invaded, and I'm here to protect you.”
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FEATURING DR. JOSHUA MILLER -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Dr. Joshua Miller joins us. He is the Director of Congress Watch atPublic Citizen, leading a large and diverse federal advocacy team advancing healthcare affordability, financial accountability, consumer protection, AI and tech policy, tax fairness, and corporate responsibility.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I’ve followed Public Citizen’s work for decades. It's one of those organizations that you maybe take for granted, that's always been there and going to be there doing really important work. And like many legal advocacy organizations like Center for Constitutional Rights, who we've profiled, or for example, the ACLU, I know that you're primarily engaged in sort of lawyering for the public interest. I saw that, that slogan on your website. How do you describe to someone who's never heard of Public Citizen, what your main goals are?
Dr. Joshua Miller: You know, we function from a very simple premise, which is democracy should be responsive to the public and not to corporations. And yes, we do engage in litigation, but we have so many tools, but the same mission.
We also engage in federal advocacy. I happen to lead a very large diverse team focused on a range of public policy issues. We also engage in the regulatory process. We produce investigative research to really help policy makers and the public understand what the executive branch is doing, what corporations are doing.
And if I was to really describe how Public Citizen works, which is we answer to the public, we represent the public and not the shareholders. And that is much different than what we're seeing right now, both in government and in corporations.
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FEATURING MICHAEL BROWNSTEIN - We live in an age when fascism and authoritarianism are rising so fast, we are left feeling more helpless and disengaged each day. It’s impossible for one person to make a difference, we tell ourselves, so we disconnect from reading the news to protect our own mental health, or consider moving to another country altogether to avoid fixing our own. But this sense of helplessness has been cultivated in an individualist society. Overcoming it takes work but is eminently doable. In a new book called Somebody Should Do Something, authors Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelley show how “anyone can help create social change.”
Michael Brownstein is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at John Jay College and Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of The Implicit Mind. His new book, co-authored with Alex Madva and Daniel Kelley isSomebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change. He discussed it with Sonali Kolhatkar.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Michael Brownstein: Thank you so much for having me, and it's an honor to be here.
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first talk about what I mentioned the sense of individualist action and helplessness is cultivated, right? I don't know if it's uniquely American, but it is very American that we think of problems, issues, and even ideas and progress in individualist terms, that individuals did this or that, or weren't able to do this or that, right? We don't really think of things in terms of systems.
Brownstein: Yeah, that's right. So that's the jumping off place for the book, that we were raised with a message about how to make change that me and my co-authors all imbibed as kids, which is basically that there are good guys and bad guys in the world, and that the bad individuals cause the problems and the good individuals act like heroes and come along and vanquish them from time to time.
It's suffused throughout our culture from John Wayne and Horatio Alger all the way up to our superhero movies today. But I think the more surprising thing is how suffused our concepts about social and political change are with an individualist ethos.
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FEATURING JENN STOWE -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Jenn Stowe, the Executive Director of theNational Domestic Workers Alliance joins us. Prior to joining NDWA, she was Deputy Executive Director at Priorities USA, the primary presidential super PAC working to defeat Donald Trump. While at Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, she led the strategic creative direction for many of its campaigns, including its now popular “Stand With Black Women” framework and branding. She also serves on the Priorities USA Foundation and Run for Something boards.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: You've done so many different things. You are now leading as executive director, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and it's in the title “Domestic workers,” who I think we can probably safely assume are primarily women of color. They're often immigrant women. They are low-income women, and across the country they do often what's invisibilized work? How is National Domestic Workers Alliance, how does it set its goals for domestic workers?
Jenn Stowe: Yes. A lot of times folks will say 10 years ago or even 15 years ago, people would say, what is domestic work? You know, what does that mean? What does a domestic worker do? The National Domestic Workers Alliance is a national organization. So we are an organization of nannies, house cleaners and home care workers, and we have over 70 affiliate organizations and chapters who work around the country and organize for dignity, respect, and fairness for the 2.2 million domestic workers in the US.
And Sonali, what you said is absolutely right. Domestic workers are majority women, majority women of color, often immigrant women, and they're working inside private homes. And so, it can be incredibly difficult because we know that oftentimes work is defined by its visibility. So, there's no list of workplaces there is no list of workers. And so, so much of our work since we were founded in 2007, has been about moving domestic workers from invisibility into visibility, really as a clear industry of workers that really deserve to work with dignity and respect and who deserve wages that allow them to sustain their families and take care of their families.
FEATURING STEVE PHILLIPS - Before figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Zohran Mamdani appeared on the national stage, there was Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/PUSH coalition, bringing together a broad-based multiracial progressive network of people and causes to the forefront of politics. Rev. Jackson, presidential candidate and legendary civil rights activist, passed away on February 17 at the age of 84.
Jackson’s legacy is rich with advocacy for the poor and people of color, for voting rights, education, healthcare, and workers’ rights. He will lie in state in South Carolina where he is from. Following that, his body will be transported to Chicago for a major celebration of life. Rev. Jackson spent the majority of his life in Chicago where the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is headquartered.
Sonali Kolhatkar: You were one of the first people I thought about when I thought about Reverend Jackson, given this legacy that he leaves behind, where he was really one of the first people—of course there was so many civil rights activists and leaders who did that—but he really was so prominent in bringing this idea of non-white Americans, people of color across racial lines, joining together, uniting to make their agenda, and to force it to be heard on a national political landscape. How much do you attribute your work to the legacy of Reverend Jackson?
Steve Phillips: Uh, all of it. Reverend Jackson was the single most important informative force in terms of who I am and what I do. And I was 20 years old when he first ran for president in 1984. I served as a delegate. I was the statewide student coordinator for the Rainbow Coalition for the 1988 campaign.
And the example that he provided was just so powerful and compelling around what politics should be and where it should go. He was very much a direct bridge between the Civil Rights Movement, somebody who was literally there at the time Dr. King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee, and bringing that vision, those values, and probably most important, that coalition into the electoral political process in the 1980s in a fundamental fashion that both, impacted politics, but also showed and illuminated the path forward for how to go about winning.
This concept that when the old minorities come together, they comprise a new majority. It is in essence, the coalition that elected Barack Obama and offers the greatest hope for the future of politics in this country.
FEATURING ED AUGUSTIN - Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has declared that the US’s launch of a war against Iran will soon be followed by adirect assault on Cuba. The Caribbean island, which had faced the longest economic sanctions by the US against any single country in history, has been crippled after the Trump administration kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and cut off Venezuelan oil sales. Trump has essentially deputized US Secretary of StateMarco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, to oversee regime change in Cuba.
Ed Augustinis an independent journalist based in Havana, Cuba. His work has regularly been featured in theNew York Times, Financial Times, NBC News, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and beyond. His recent work includes adocumentary shorton how US sanctions impact Cuba’s health care system. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar from Havana about how Cubans are coping with decades of sanctions and whether there could be a US war on Cuba.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: As I mentioned, the Venezuelan regime change that the US has essentially engineered, had this very direct ripple effect on Cuba, but even before that, Cuba was suffering. Is it fair to say that Cuba is at the point that it is today as a direct result of the US essentially squeezing its government for decades and refusing to allow the island to flourish?
Ed Augustin: Well, there's a massive ideological effort, well-financed by the way, by US taxpayers to try and make us say ‘No’ to that, to make the answer to that question ‘No.’ But the answer to the question from any objective, balanced, serious analytical point of view has to be ‘Yes.’
Cuba has been pushed to this point by US sanctions. So, Cuba has been sanctioned longer than any other country in modern history. It's been under a US sanctions regime for 67 years, two thirds of a century. And the sanctions on Cuba are among the most powerful sanctions in the world. The only country that could really compete with that in terms of a target that suffers sanctions is the other country that's in the international headlines today: Iran.
FEATURING KAVEH EHSANI - The Iranian Red Crescent Society isreportingthat nearly 800 Iranians have been killed in US and Israeli air strikes since the Trump Administration launched anillegalwar on Iran on February 28 without Congressional approval.
Among the first targets of US and Israeli bombs was anelementary girls schoolin the southern Iranian city of Minab where 175 people,most of them children, were killed. AnAl Jazeera investigationhas concluded that the strike on the school was most likely deliberate. The US and Israel’s airstrikes also resulted in themass extrajudicial assassinationsof Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and most of the nation’s top military commanders.
Iran has retaliated by aiming drone airstrikes at US military bases located inneighboring Gulf Arab nationsincluding the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iraq.
Donald Trump, who had proclaimed himself the so-called peace president, has, in typical fashion,contradicted himselfand said that the Iran war would last weeks or a lot longer.
Kaveh Ehsani is associate professor of International Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. He is a contributing editor of MERIP (Middle East Report) and sits on its board of directors. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what the US-Israel war on Iran means.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: First of all, we had expected that the US would attack Iran. There were a lot of threats being made, and the airstrikes launched February 28th. You and I are speaking on Tuesday, March 3rd. A lot has happened in just a handful of days, including a spectacularly large number of civilian casualties and the wiping out of Iran's leadership—how have you been feeling through all of this, as somebody who studies what's happening there, I imagine you have family there—give me your initial thoughts on this war that threatens to destabilize the entire area?
Kaveh Ehsani: Um… despondence. I mean, knowing and being aware of the history of similar conflicts in the region. For example, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan Syria. The future looks really bleak. This will have devastating consequences in the long run, not just for Iran, but internationally. There's nothing to feel good about in this process. But the worst thing is that this war will probably put an end, it will probably fail to achieve one of its stated goals. I mean there are at least half a dozen supposed stated goals that have been uttered by the Trump administration. But one of them is regime change. I don't think it will lead to that.
The Iranian political leadership is pretty well established. It has supporters. It has a military infrastructure. It controls the economy, for better or for worse. So this will not lead to that, to any kind of regime change. But it will lead to greater repression at home more pauperization of the Iranian population.
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FEATURING TARA RAGHUVEER -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Tara Raghuveer, director and founder of theTenant Union Federationjoins us. The Tenant Union Federation is a union of unions organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale, as well as KC Tenants, the city-wide tenant union in Kansas City, MO. Tara has been organizing with tenants for more than a decade.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: What does it mean to have a union of unions, especially when it comes to tenants? We usually think of unions as being something that organizes workers, not rent-payers.
Tara Raghuveer: So tenant unions are actually an age old arrangement. We're not inventing anything here, but what we're doing with the Tenant Union Federation is trying to understand and refine a practice of organizing tenants that can maximize tenants, political and economic leverage, and their power. Much like a job site, much like a shop floor, tenants could exercise a lot of power in the places where they live, if they're connected. There's latent power that exists in our homes, in the properties in which we live, in the trailer parks in which some of us live. But that power is only something that's available to us to exercise if we get organized.
Increasingly, we're borrowing tactics from organized labor to think about organizing tenants at home in similar ways to how workers are organized on their jobs. Specifically, what that means to us, is we're trying to organize what we call supermajority strike-ready unions.
FEATURING STACY SUH - A woman was caught on video in early Februarysetting fire to a warehousein Kansas City, Missouri, rumored to be considered for use as an ICE detention facility. The sale of the facility fell through. While that particular incident was an unorthodox means of opposing ICE’s rapid expansion of detention centers, communities around the country have been using more traditional means to counter detention centers–and they’ve been winning.
The residents of Hutchins, a small town near Dallas, Texas,successfully stoppedthe sale and lease of a million square foot warehouse to ICE. A similar story played out inSouth Fulton, Georgia.
Stacy Suh is the program director atDetention Watch Network, a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States. They are also a co-founder of Survived and Punished, a national organization working to end the criminalization of domestic and sexual violence survivors. Stacy spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the success stories of communities stopping ICE detention expansions.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Before we get to the way in which communities have been fighting back, remind us of just how many facilities ICE already runs around the country. People might have heard of the now infamous facility in Dilley, Texas where young children are being held, or the one in Florida that was nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.” But there are centers all around the country, many of which, of course predate the increase in funding that ICE got before this rapid expansion enabled by the increase in budget from the Big Beautiful Bill. How many detention centers had ICE been running?
Stacy Suh: So, currently there are over 200 detention centers across the country, and the Trump administration has been using every tool at its disposal to target, detain and deport as many people as possible in every area of public life. So, all across the country, there has been massive detention expansion, and it is no coincidence that even prior to this administration coming into power, that the US boasted the largest immigration detention system in the entire world.
And with the summer [2025] funding that you mentioned that boosted billions of dollars to ICE, ICE now is the largest law enforcement agency in the US. And the budget actually rivals that of many of the world's militaries.
FEATURING NIKKI MARÍN BAENA - Although rural states such as North Carolina did not garner as much national attention for the 2025-26 federal assault as Minnesota and California, it was an epicenter of ICE operations in the South. With a growing population of immigrant workers, especially from Latin America, groups like Siembra NC have taken on the mantle of resisting immigration enforcement.
Calling itself a power-building community organization that focuses on immigrant and labor rights, Siembra NC established itself as a national leader, sharing resources with other groups.
Nikki Marín Baena is a co-founder and co-director atSiembra NC, a Latine base-building organization in North Carolina. She was previously finance director at Mijente, where she also helped coordinate the organization’s Sin El Estado work with activists in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and other parts of Latinoamérica. She is currently a core trainer at Training for Change and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how her organization led North Carolina's anti-ICE resistance.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: The ICE invasion of Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles garnered so much attention, but cities like Charlotte have also faced ICE terror even if we haven’t seen much national media. How big was ICE’s so-called Operation Charlotte’s Web at its peak?
Nikki Marín Baena: ICE agents are in Charlotte all the time. The Charlotte ICE field office is one of the biggest in the South. Since the beginning of 2025, Siembra NC had been tracking, along with other immigrant organizations in North Carolina, an increase in detentions in Mecklenburg County where Charlotte is located. All year we noticed detentions at ICE check-ins at court as well as at traffic stops.
As of November 15, 2025, in addition to the ICE presence we had Border Patrol head Greg Bovino and his agents coming into Charlotte. This was very unusual. Historically we don't think of Charlotte as a border city. But under the Trump administration, Border Patrol’s jurisdiction is everywhere. Like ICE agents, Border Patrol agents are masked even though they have different training.
ICE agents are usually trying to do some kind of targeted enforcement operation and are looking for specific people, although they might detain someone else on the way to finding that person. They call that a collateral arrest. But the Border Patrol enforcement was random. There were agents hanging out at gas stations, in parking lots, looking to see who they could detain.
GUEST:Nikki Marín Baenais a co-founder and co-director atSiembra NC, a Latine base-building organization in North Carolina.
Kolhatkar: How immigrant-heavy is North Carolina?
Baena: Charlotte, North Carolina has the largest immigrant population in the state, and it's growing. But what makes it different from other cities with ICE presence such as LA, Chicago or even Minneapolis, is that the population is more spread out, and not as dense. It can take a really long time, especially during rush hour, to get from one side of Charlotte to the other.
Kolhatkar: How has Siembra NC responded to the ICE and CBP presence?
Baena: In North Carolina, during the 2018 midterm elections which took place under the first Trump Administration, densely populated counties elected a bunch of progressive sheriffs, almost as a backlash to the 2016 presidential election. Many of them said they were going to end their ICE collaboration programs. Then in 2019, ICE did what at the time, felt like a very big operation here, where they detained over 200 people in about 10 days across the state. By then Siembra NC had setup a hotline. We had trained people to do what we call “verification,” which is documenting ICE presence and verifying that it is actually ICE and not some other law enforcement agency. The reason that we did that is because we noticed that even the rumor of ICE agents could totally shut down a neighborhood or a community. People would not go to school or work. We wanted to be able to help people make decisions about how to go about their day with the best information possible.
We already set up a lot of that infrastructure in the first Trump administration. A lot of it is just helping people do their own fact checking for their neighborhood, for their community. In 2025, after the inauguration of this second administration, we just saw a level of panic and a level of rumor-spreading that we had never experienced before. We once more tried to help people know what questions to ask, what they're looking for, both inside and outside immigrant communities.
In addition to that, people reached out to us requesting things like trainings for their church because their congregants were afraid to come to services. We had already been doing such trainings but the need for them grew very quickly in a short period of time.
Kolhatkar: It sounds like it was a matter of increasing outreach and rapidly escalating your reach in this second term. What about sharing your model of community defense with the rest of the nation?
Baena: In early 2025, we launched our “Defend and Recruit” playbook that people can download from our website. Part of the reason we did that was because we foresaw that this thing that we figured out, other people are going to have to figure it out. And maybe we can help them learn so many things the hard way if we share some of our best practices and some of our learnings.
But our longer-term goal for North Carolina is to create a bigger base of support so that we can build more political power and stop and this from happening again. We studied other groups that have done similar things and learned a lot from ISAIAH in Minnesota, an interfaith community organizing group that built teams and structures to broaden their base of support.
By the time Border Patrol came to North Carolina, we were able to learn how to expand our capacity and how to have more tiers of volunteers doing things so that more people could get trained to meet the situation.
Kolhatkar: When we saw the ICE surge in other parts of the country, people came up with some very unique and interesting ways to take on federal agents, including rapid response community organizing where they would put out information really quickly about where ICE was and then bring people out to challenge and confront them with bullhorns. In Chicago and Minneapolis, people are using whistles to alert others about ICE. Did you adopt some of those newer and more innovative ways of responding to ICE or did they not apply because of the unique geography and culture of North Carolina?
Baena: We knew that in the trainings we did before Border Patrol showed up, we had to prepare people to witness a detention. We advise people that if there are just two of them, the most important thing is to document the arrest and to try to get the name of the person being detained. We've seen in other places like Chicago when people were unconstitutionally arrested, such documentation was very useful in court to be able to get that person out.
But if there are four people witnessing an ICE arrest, two of them should document it the other two should alert folks on the perimeter to what's happening, such as yelling “Hey, there's, there's an ICE operation happening around here, just a heads up.”
And if there are more than four people, we advised people to sing.
Kolhatkar: Sing?
Baena: Yes. We had the whistles but what we really want to do in a situation of an ICE arrest is to help people stay calm. We’ve learned from the long history of the Civil Rights movement how important singing was. In our training, we had people practice singing This Little Light of Mine. Singing can help lower the temperature. That was one of the things that we did differently.
I really liked the Portland, Oregon response to ICE with the inflatable animal costumes but we didn’t get to do that.
Kolhatkar: One of the things that I noticed that Siembra NC does is help immigrant workers recover lost wages or stolen wages. Why is that an important part of your work and how does it fit with protecting immigrant workers?
Baena: North Carolina has for years ranked as the worst state in the United States to be a worker. That's because of a combination of circumstances, one of which is that it’s a “right to work” state. Also, the minimum wage is very low and there are very few workplace protections. Our cities are growing quickly, in large part due to immigrant workers. In Charlotte, Raleigh, and Durham, there are construction sites everywhere and a lot of that work is being done by immigrant workers.
Very often those immigrant workers are the subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor—a long chain in construction. When people don't get paid, they often think there's nothing they can do about it. They might think, it’s only a problem if I haven't been paid $10,000 or $20,000. But really, for an individual who did a paint job and didn't get paid their thousand dollar fee, in some ways that’s even worse because they were likely counting on that money to pay their rent and groceries.
Siembra NC does intakes with such workers and help them figure out what their situation is and help them collect information and proof. We do workshops for workers to ensure they have the right documentation when getting hired in order to protect themselves. Every one of these workers deserves to live a dignified life. Workers in North Carolina are being mistreated and undervalued and we want to change that.
Kolhatkar: It sounds as though it’s a systemic feature, that if you can keep workers living in fear of immigration enforcement, it's easier to steal their wages, it's easier to exploit their labor. Is that why Siembra NC wants to build political power, in order to change the system?
Baena: Yes, absolutely. The only thing that will change our current conditions is building political power. And in order to do that, you need lots of organized people. But when people are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being randomly detained—and at this point, even US citizens are afraid they will be targeted based on their race—they are not likely to organize. The same is true if they’re not getting paid for one out of every four jobs they do. If they're struggling to make ends meet, they're not likely to organize.
Kolhatkar: How does North Carolina fit with the national political context? I assume you aren’t counting on base building for the Democratic Party because leaders like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris haven’t exactly been pro-immigrant.
Baena: This was also something we learned from Minnesota, that we need to build the kind of power where we can negotiate with elected officials rather than work to elect them. I think North Carolina is important nationally in that it’s growing very quickly. It's a state that is 50% rural, so it has a lot of the qualities of what the US is.
North Carolina is also an interesting state politically because before the period of 2010-2014, the state had basically been run by the Democratic Party for a hundred years. In some ways, the national rightwing takeover, that is what happened in North Carolina between 2010 and 2014. So, it’s an important state to learn from about how the rightwing playbook works, how the right makes their own district maps and wins elections, and takes over institutions like public universities. And at the same time, it’s an important case study in how we organize and fight back.
Kolhatkar: How is your organization engaged in culture shifting. Although the immigrant population is growing, people of immigrant origin are still a minority in many states. How are you reaching out to justice-loving white North Carolinians to become your allies?
Baena: Something that is very unique to our state is that we live with each other. There's a rural county, Randolph, just south of where I live, and a lot of the Latinos I know work in textile factories there. They work alongside rural white people. And many of those white people identify as conservatives, but they are living alongside these Latino workers. They have relationships, they're friends. That’s very common here.
People form these ties all the time, and they see that as being separate from their political life. Part of what we end up trying to invite people into is to remind them that it is part of your political life that you have these relationships. That is really important.
And then with our wage theft work, we could have an office of caseworkers where workers come in and we call the boss, and then we sue the boss and keep the interactions one-on-one and private. But we choose to be very public with our wage theft actions, because we want to tell the story that when this happens to one worker, it is the entire community's problem. That's the way we've tried to talk about things like immigration enforcement too. When one person is unconstitutionally arrested, that is not just that person or their family's problem, it’s everybody in that community's problem. We don't want to live in a place where that happens.
I really do believe that most people in the state of North Carolina don't see themselves as part of a rightwing agenda to defund public schools. We help people see that when such things happen, they have to take action.
Kolhatkar: What does it look like for Siembra NC to build political power in a concrete sense, not just among Latinos but other non-Latino immigrants and Black residents?
Baena: Yes, in recent years non-Latino people started approaching us saying they also want to build power like we are doing. We started a project called Make NC Work so that we could have a multiracial organizing space alongside our Latino organizing. Siembra NC members have worked with Make NC Work members around Fourth Amendment workplaces, which is the idea that if there is an employer who is an ally rather than a perpetrator, what can that employer do to protect their workers if ICE shows up. So, instead of doing Know Your Rights workshops only for Immigrant Communities, we started doing these Fourth Amendment workplace trainings for employers and for business owners about what to do if their rights were being violated. Your Fourth Amendment rights get violated if a federal agent comes into your private space without a warrant.
So, we trained them on how to ask for a judicial warrant rather than an administrative warrant. We canvassed more a thousand businesses across the state and many of them have become Fourth Amendment workplaces. And some cities in North Carolina even started passing Fourth Amendment workplace resolutions.
This is a good first step in the direction of saying that a lot of North Carolinians are being impacted by government overreach. One kind of government overreach is unconstitutional ICE arrests and another kind is how cities and counties are being impacted by significant cuts embedded in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
We're about to launch an exciting project called the Enough Should Be Enough Listening Tour which involves Latino and non-Latino community members going to their workplaces, churches, schools, neighborhoods, to find out what people in North Carolina actually want for their state.
Thu, 26 Feb 2026
3123 - Kaiser Nurses’s Strike, Largest in History, Ends after a Month
FEATURING LUCKY LONGORIA - More than 30,000 unionized workers at California and Hawaii facilities of Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit healthcare providers, arereturning to workafter 4 weeks on the picket line. The nurses, lab technicians, pharmacists and others, are members of UNAC/UHCP, United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals, whichsaidthe strike was the largest open-ended work stoppage of healthcare professionals in US history.
Workers say their salaries have not kept pace with inflation and that Kaiser doesn’t employ enough workers, which endangers patient safety. Meanwhile, Kaiser was found to be sitting on$66 billion in unrestricted reserveseven as the company has continued increasing patient premiums and kept salaries flat. Further, the nurses union has reviewed Kaiser’s holdings and found that Kaiser Permanente Group Trust has investments inGeo group and CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison corporations with major government contracts to detain immigrants.
Lucky Longoria is a pediatric nurse at a Kaiser facility in Downey, California. And she’s a writer, activist, community volunteer, and member of UNAC/UHCP. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about why her union was on strike and what they won.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's talk about what it was like to be on the picket line. you and I are speaking Tuesday, February 24th, which is the day basically that I understand is the official end of the work stoppage. What has it been like to be on the picket line for four weeks, to not be at work?
Lucky Longoria: The hardest thing about being on the picket line is having a loss of control when it comes to the patient care that's ongoing, even though we have to step away from the bedside. I'm a pediatric nurse. We have patients who come and they stay with us maybe a month at a time because they have chronic conditions. So, they're not just patients, they become family. And to know that you have no sense or understanding as to how they are, as to what the care is like that they're receiving, the worry, the stress of, of not knowing. You know, we are nurses, it's an occupation. but because our heart is most importantly the biggest asset we have as, as professionals, as nurses, as care providers, we don't leave the job when we clock out. So, we took the worry with us and the worry was with us on the line.
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FEATURING VINCE WARREN -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Vincent Warren, executive director of theCenter for Constitutional Rightsjoins us. He is a leading expert on racial injustice and discriminatory policing and oversees CCR's litigation and advocacy work, using international and domestic law to challenge human rights abuses, including racial, gender and LGBTQIA injustice. He previously monitored South Africa's historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, and was a senior staff attorney at the ACLU and a criminal defense attorney for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I’ve followed CCR’s work for many, many years, since I was a journalist a couple decades ago, and there've been so many different issues you've worked on. I remember talking to your lawyers around Guantanamo, and of course the work evolves, but how do you summarize what CCR’s main goals are?
Vince Warren: CCR has been around for a lot longer than from when you were a journalist or even an astrophysicist. We started in 1956, so this year is our 60th year in existence, and CCR is a legal and advocacy organization that works with communities under threat to be able to move them towards a path of liberation.
And when you hear the name Center for Constitutional Rights, you would think that we only do constitutional rights and we actually don't.
What we do is that we infuse both, the constitutional rights as well as international human rights and international human rights principles into our litigation and advocacy.
So, we believe that if you have a lawyer, an activist and a storyteller, you can change the world. And so, we work with lawyers, we work with community and movement groups, we work with storytellers, and the litigation is very bold, it's innovative, it's experimental in some ways. The advocacy work is about building power in communities so that they can make the change that they wanna see. And our work with storytellers and our strategic communications is really designed about reframing from state power narratives to framing towards people's narratives: What are the people actually experiencing? What are they actually going through as opposed to what the government is saying is happening.
FEATURING DANIA MUÑOZ - New York City’s largest nurses strike, numbering at about 15,000 at its peak, is coming to an end–at least for a majority of striking nurses. Nurses from multiple hospitals have been picketing for a month in what was the second major strike in three years. Now, those working at Montefiore, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Mount Sinai Morningside and West hospitalsratified an offer, while more than 4,000 nurses atNew York Presbyterian hospitalvoted to continue their strike, now in its sixth week.
Meanwhile, in Southern California, tens of thousands of nurses at Kaiser Permanente are also in theirfourth week of striking.
Dania Muñoz, a Nurse Practitioner at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and a member of the New York State Nurses Association spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the strike and what it achieved.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's first start with the reason why nurses went on strike. As I mentioned at it’s peak, 15,000 people were on strike at pickets around the New York city area. What was the main reason for the strike?
Dania Muñoz: There were a couple of reasons why we went on strike, but the main one I would say was because of health insurance. Before we went on strike, before we dropped our 10-day notice, we were notified that our insurance was going to be a problem for our employers to continue to pay for. And that basically forced us to go on strike. They wanted us to, you know, to make cuts to our insurance, to the point where there was gonna potentially be premiums and co-insurance and just a lot of things that we weren't used to doing and paying for when it comes to insurances for nurses, at least in the facilities that we work in. So that was one of the major things that pushed nurses to strike, honestly.
Also our pension, even though the rates for the pensions were known the hospitals did not wanna sign off on those rates, and that made us question whether they were gonna continue our pension or not.
FEATURING ALEX VITALE - In 2020, when millions of Americans marched to protest the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many, including Zohran Mamdani, called for adefunding of police. A few months before his election to become Mayor of New York City, Mamdaniannouncedhe would not in fact be defunding the police if elected. And, soon after he was elected, Mamdani announced he would beaskingNYPD Police Chief Jessica Tisch to stay on.
Mamdani’s plan for policing and public safety appears to hinge on the formation of a Department of Community Safety, to provide services for New Yorkers in crisis so they can avoid contact with the criminal justice system. To that end the New York City Councilintroduceda bill in December 2025 to form such a department.
Alex Vitale is a Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He is also the author of a 2017 book called The End of Policing and was invited by Mamdani to join the mayor’s transition team to work on community safety issues. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the potential promise of NYC's experiment in community safety.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Before we get to what Mayor Mamdani is planning and what community safety actually means under his leadership, let's talk about the situation of policing and crime in New York City, prior to Mamdani taking power. NYPD chief Jessica Tisch has been credited by many, including by Mamdani himself for reducing crime levels in New York City. Crime is in fact down. Did she have something to do with it? If so, what? What has the state of policing and crime been in New York City before Mamdani took office?
Alex Vitale: So yeah, the good news is that serious crime in particular is down. And we have pretty high confidence in that this is coming down from the elevated levels that occurred during the COVID Pandemic. I think it's important to point out though, that this is a national trend.
Nationally, crime went up during the pandemic, as it did in New York and nationally, crime is coming down. And so, to say that this is the result of the strategic actions of one police leader in one city seems to really be a kind of parochial understanding of the nature of what is clearly a much larger and broader range phenomenon.
I think the main accomplishments that Tisch can point to is that she oversaw the forcing out of some of Mayor Adams' corrupt cronies who were basically selling favors and, and engaged in all kinds of corruption. So that, I think is something that definitely happened on her watch. But the idea that that a national drop in crime is the result of the actions of one police commissioner seems a bit farfetched.
FEATURING DOLORES HUERTA - Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become thesingle largest, most well-funded police force in the nation, thanks to Congressionally approved funding. In spite of the fact that Democratsstymiedemergency funding for ICE in the latest government spending bill, the agencycontinues to operate. Meanwhile, more than two thirds of Americans polleddisapproveof ICE operations, saying they make people less safe. It’s not the first time in the nation’s history that state forces have taken aim at immigrants, particularly those from Latin America. From theMexican American repatriationin the 1930s to the so-calledOperation Wetbackin the 1950s, immigrants have faced programs of mass, often violent, removal.
Today we turn to a legendary figure active in civil and human rights, whose activism spans half a century. Dolores Huerta, Founder & President of theDolores Huerta Foundation. In 1962, she co-founded theUnited Farm Workers of America (UFW)with Cesar Chavez and served as Vice President, playing a vital role in securing critical labor rights for farmworkers. In 2002, Huerta used the $100,000 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship to establish the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF), which empowers grassroots leadership and advocates for educational equity, LGBTQ+ rights, infrastructure improvements, and civic engagement in underserved communities. She was also recently featured in a short film by Ellen Gavin calledThe People, United.
Dolores Huerta spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about her participation in the anti-ICE protests.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Let me start with the question of how you are viewing the current situation, the current struggle against ICE terror. For some young activists that might feel like this is unprecedented, this is brand new, but for those who have been around for a long time, there have been so many moments in history where the government has basically attacked either Mexican Americans or immigrants or people perceived to be Spanish speaking folks. This is not new, and I'm wondering what you are thinking about as you view the current moment in terms of the historical comparisons.
Dolores Huerta: Well, we've seen this kind of behavior but it's usually been by private security people or local police, that in instances of when you had a labor strike. Like in the United Farm Workers, we had five people who were actually killed, and one of them was killed by a Sheriff’s deputy in Kern County. And so we have seen this kind of brutality in the past, but it's been by, by the local police or local people that, that were anti the workers.
But to see something on the wholesale level that we're seeing now, and especially when it is being supported and promoted by our president and to have this national a goon squad, you might say, when you have all of these people that have been hired by the government and been given bonuses to go in there and to beat up and, and to kill immigrants to put them into detention centers, I think the only comparable thing would be like what happened in Nazi Germany back in the late thirties and early forties when the Nazis were in control. So, this is something we never thought that we would see in the United States of America.
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FEATURING SHELBY CHESTNUT -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Shelby Chestnut, Executive Director of theTransgender Law Centerjoins us. Shelby has more than two decades of movement leadership in community organizing and policy advocacy for LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's start with what it is that Transgender Law Center actually does, what your goals are. It's seems like it's very clearly in the name that you work on behalf of the rights of transgender people and you work, I imagine in the legal realm. Tell us more what exactly this organization does and also maybe delve into the history. How long has it been around?
Shelby Chestnut: Yeah. Transgender Law Center is the largest national trans-led organization working to advocate for self-determination for all people, not just trans people. We are a little over 20 years old. We first started as a one-time grant project of the National Center for LGBT Rights, which was formerly known as the National Center for Lesbian Rights. We first started in the Bay Area, then we went to statewide in California, and then in the mid 2010s became more of a national focused organization.
And at this point we now have about 50 staff working at the intersections of legal advocacy, impact litigation, movement building and narrative change work. We do mostly national work working with grassroots partners in states, and leaders in states, but we also do some level of global advocacy through some of our coalition work.
We organize, empower, and build the infrastructure needed for trans liberation in this moment. That means creating the world that we deserve, that will work for everyone rather than fix the systems that are broken that we've inherited.
FEATURING RUBEN TORRES -The Trump administration has imposed federal immigration enforcement agents on states around the nation, including ones where the immigrant population is relatively minuscule. This includesMaine, the whitest state in the nation, where a mere 4% of the population is of immigrant origin. ICE agents have wreaked havoc on the state, and even after Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine requested an end to the operations, tensions remain high and ICE sightings continue.
But immigrant rights advocates have adopted the defensive measures that activists around the country have popularized. Ruben Torres is the Advocacy and Policy Manager for theMaine Immigrants' Rights Coalition. The coalition serves over 100 member organizations across the state of Maine seeking to improve legal, social, and economic conditions for immigrants in the state of Maine through advocacy, information sharing, and collaboration. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how activists are organizing anti-ICE resistance in Maine.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: The language that ICE has been using in states around the country has been as dehumanizing as its actions, and in Maine, they have called their operation “Catch of the Day.” If there was ever dehumanizing language, literally reducing immigrants to fish being caught, we would be hard pressed to find anything worse than that. How has so-called Operation Catch of the Day actually played out? What does it look like on the ground?
Ruben Torres: Yeah, thank you. So, Operation Catch of the Day as it was dubbed by the federal government started on January 20th in the state of Maine where the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and our partners manage an immigrant defense hotline that has been colloquially known as the ICE Watch hotline.
But through that hotline, we're able to receive calls and monitor situations on the ground from community members to better provide them resources and understand what issues they're facing. Through that hotline, we were able to really get a good understanding of the community needs, through conversations with community members themselves directly. We also hosted a lot of community conversations with immigrant community leaders from across the state to understand how this was playing out in their communities.
Overall, while the rhetoric claims to have been targeting the worst of the worst and going after criminals, the reality is that we saw something completely different. We saw families being torn apart, grocery stores and places that were considered safe and routine in everyday life have all of a sudden lost that security blanket, and people are fearful and scared of what the world has changed into.
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FEATURING VICTOR PICKARD - In one of the largest mass firings of any media outlet in history, the Washington Post recentlylaid off hundreds of employees, or nearly one third of its entire workforce. Owned by one of the world’s richest men, Jeff Bezos, the paper has lost huge numbers of subscribers, in large part because of the 2024 decision by Bezos to end presidential endorsements.
The paper’s publisher,Will Lewisjustified the firings saying, “difficult decisions have been taken in order to ensure the sustainable future of The Post so it can for many years ahead publish high-quality nonpartisan news.” Lewis also announced his own resignation, in which he thanked Bezos, saying “The institution could not have a better owner.”
What does the Washington Post’s decimation mean for an already-fractured news industry?
Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change Center. He has authored several books, including Democracy without Journalism? and America’s Battle for Media Democracy. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about why The Washington Post is being destroyed and what, if anything, can come out of it?
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: First, let's talk about why the Washington Post had been failing, because that's the big question at the heart of the decisions its new owner claims he's taking. He's saying that he's simply using data to justify how to fix the outlet, but the fact is that it had been losing a lot of subscribers. Now, I pointed out that 2024 that decision to not endorse presidential candidates may have had a lot to do with, and indeed it was documented that hundreds of thousands of people did end their subscriptions. Is it a lack of subscriptions that you think has led to this?
Victor Pickard: Well, that's certainly a contributing factor, and I think there are at least two general narratives here that we could point to, to try to make sense of what just happened to the Washington Post. One is, as you already suggested, that there's been a series of mismanagement moves, you might call them, over the last year or so where you know, not only has there been a kind of exodus of subscribers, NPR reported that after that decision to spike the endorsement for Kamala Harris, they lost 250,000 subscribers. That was a major blow to their subscription base.
And then there have been other moves such as the shift to the right of their editorial pages where they've been instructed to focus on personal liberties and free markets. So there's been all this meddling from above into the Washington Post's news production, which isn't supposed to happen.
FEATURING JEET HEER - The latest trove of Epstein files released by the United States Justice department came many weeks after a deadline Congress had established through the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Some three million pages of documents published containheavy redactions, and yet, in many cases,victimsof the sordid sex trafficking ring that Epstein led were exposed.
Meanwhile, the perpetrators and beneficiaries of Jeffrey Epstein’s web continue to operate in public with impunity.
What do Epstein’s operations tell us about the capitalist world of billionaire elites?
Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast,The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” He's written about the Epstein fileshereandhere. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the how the story reveals the ugly collusion of moneyed elites.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's first talk, before we get to the “warlord” aspect of it, let's talk about what the Epstein files say about the social networking that it seems as though the wealthy of the world are involved in behind closed doors. This sordid story unveils of course, not only the way in which women and girls have been victimized and offered up as objects for mostly men to enjoy. But it also reveals the way in which often these connections were built on trading favors, much of it after Epstein was already convicted, was already in the sights of federal investigators?
Jeet Heer: Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. I mean obviously the most horrifying part is the sexual predation of children, which Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell participated in. And, which I mean, there's considerable evidence to believe that they were involved with sort of trafficking. And one of the interesting things is that the only Epstein and Maxwell were ever charged with this, even though it seems to go farther.
The way I would put it is like if you're convicting someone, as you did with Maxwell, of being a trafficker, then they must have had clients. But the department of Justice position seems to be that trafficking happened but, you had pimps without Johns.
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FEATURING DR. PHILIP VERHOEF -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 on Rising Up for Justice, Dr. Phil Verhoef joins us. He is an adult and pediatric ICU physician and Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. He is also the immediate past president (and a national board member) ofPhysicians for a National Health Program; past president of the Illinois Single Payer Coalition; past president of the PNHP-IL chapter; and was faculty advisor for the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine Students for a National Health Program chapter since its inception, before moving to Hawaii in 2019.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So it's all in the name—Physicians for National Health Program—but it seems that what sets PNHP apart is that it is the only physician-led national organization that is focused specifically on achieving single payer healthcare, achieving a tax-funded universal healthcare system where everybody is covered. Is that accurate?
Dr. Philip Verhoef: That's exactly right. We've been in this fight now for almost 40 years, and we were started by physicians and over the years we have continued to grow. We now number over 25,000 physician-supporters who believe that a single payer national health insurance system is really the solution for assuring universal healthcare coverage for all people in the United States.
Kolhatkar: So, an entire organization of thousands of people focused on achieving one simple thing that has a huge demand and a huge need sounds pretty straightforward. How do you summarize what you have to do to achieve this,
Verhoef: There's so much that we have to do. And, and if you, you know, if you were to ask the people that founded PNHP almost 40 years ago, if they thought that this organization was still gonna be around 40 years later, they would've laughed at you. I've asked them that question and they've said, “we figured that we'd be able to get this within a few years, and there would be no problem. And then we would suddenly see that everybody in this country would have equitable access to healthcare,” because, right now we have a healthcare system in the United States that leaves almost 30 million people without any health insurance at all. And that means they avoid seeking care. They can't afford to pay for it when they need it. And it means that, that we are literally hurting them in that context.
And that's a real stark contrast to any other developed country in the world where they all guarantee healthcare for the people that live there. And so we're really an outlier as a developed country.
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FEATURING TERENCE KEEL - Five years after the record-breaking racial justice protests around the United States in response to the police murder of George Floyd, law enforcement continues to killmore than a thousand people a yearnationwide. Now,a new bookreveals how coroners and other death investigators help cover up police injustices and are effectively complicit.
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, when we think about the issue of police violence, we often picture the horrific things that happen to men like Eric Garner or George Floyd. But maybe we don't think about the things that happen that are not within our view, that aren't captured by cameras. And we certainly don't necessarily think about what happens when people are in police custody, in jails in particular, meaning they haven't even been charged or convicted often. Tell me what pulled you into writing this book that really tells a story, I think, that is an under-covered aspect of police violence.
Terence Keel: You know, Sonali, there were really two things that started all of this work for me. One was witnessing the public murder of George Floyd, and really, if we remember that moment—yes, it was a recorded death, and the medical examiner of him and Hennepin County wrote that it was a homicide.
But what was particularly troubling about his death record was an effort to say that his heart was the real cause for why he died. And if you might recall, the topline on the autopsy was cardiopulmonary arrest, complicating law enforcement subdual. Essentially [they were saying] George Floyd had a bad heart [and] because he had a bad heart, police had to use more force, and that force was ultimately what took his life.
And I remember reading that and watching the reaction around the world, and it occurred to me how many more records are written like this? How many more cases are there where people die in police custody, either during arrest or during jail or in jail, and the death investigator blames the victim and uses their own preexisting condition or their body to really explain what happened.
FEATURING ELLEN GAVIN - As the Trump administration continues to use ICE agents to terrorize cities such as Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere, local organizers have come up with innovative and creative ways to defend themselves. From rapid response networks to documentation of ICE arrests, people have been showing up for their neighbors and communities. A new short movie by filmmaker Ellen Gavin, called "The People, United," depicts the importance of solidarity against ICE raids.
Ellen Gavin is a writer/director living in Los Angeles and New York. Her theater and film work is female-driven and socially conscious, born from her experiences as a passionate lesbian feminist activist. She wrote and produced five digital short films as a part of the anti-Trump resistance movement in the U.S. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about her short film.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, this very short film The People, United, it's not a documentary, it is a fictional depiction of basically an ICE raid. How do you describe it to audiences?
Ellen Gavin: Well, it's interesting because I, you know, as a writer, I mull over things and I look at situations and try to figure out you know, what needs to be said when, and it felt, when I started this process that getting neighbors to understand that we need to be responsible for each other and that we can stand up together because we have greater numbers, than they do. So, I wanted to come up with something that as a dramatic writer in a short form, where you could really touch people's hearts. And my theory with that is that you touch people's hearts in order to move their feet, right?
So, getting people to understand that if we have a neighborly response, if we have a response that's based in kindness and activism that we can actually impact the direction of this country.
Many different things come into it. It's a fascinating process. I had a friend who was managing a bathroom renovation, and she got a call from the project manager, and while she was talking to him, she heard this glass shatter, which was her new bathroom door. And I heard that story and it was ICE that was taking the worker. And I thought, wow, you know, that's Kristallnacht.
That's what happened in Germany. and so that kind of made its way into the script. So little pieces of things like that. The Japanese internment, which is so relevant, I wanted to bring that in.
Hundreds of actions in all fifty states onFriday January 30sent a message to the Trump administration against its deployment of ICE agents into American cities.
The coordinated action was considered a national strike, encouraging students and workers to not attend school or work, to not shop or engage in any retail activity. Small business owners and non profit organizations shut down offices for the day, and marched and protested.
In Los Angeles, where ICE raids have become a near-daily occurrence, thousands of people convened outside City Hall at 1 pm, including high school students and union members. By 6 pm, the protestended in eight arrests.
Sonali Kolhatkar attended the gathering in the earlier part of the day and spoke with several people including high school students, workers, and lawyers about why they were on strike in this latest edition of the series Rising Up In the Streets.
Wolfgang: My name is Wolfgang [unintelligible]. Call me Wolfy G, or whatever you like. I’m 16, proud to be 16. And I'm a proud supporter of hating ICE and hating Trump in any way.
Sonali Kolhatkar: You're supposed to be at school today, but you're not.
Wolfgang: Yeah. Who wouldn't, who wouldn't not skip this? This is incredible. And absolutely it is necessary that we skip school to go do this. No work, no school, no shopping. You just gotta do it.
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FEATURING CRAIG AARON -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.
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I've spoken to you many times over the years through around your work with Free Press, and I recall the first sort of exposure that I had to Free Press was around issues of net neutrality. This was an issue that had animated a lot of folks in the media justice realm, but Free Press seems to have become so much bigger than that as well in recent years. And I imagine that's in response to the fact that our press freedoms are being whittled away. How do you describe what the organization's main goals are in this moment?
Craig Aaron: Sure. Well, at our core, Free Press has always been a media policy organization, but one that really cares about involving the public in those decisions. So, from the start, 20 years ago, the idea was there were all these decisions happening in Washington and being made in corporate boardrooms, sort of in the public's name, but without their involvement or consent. And so, what we've tried to do is change that, is to give the public a voice in these important deliberations, in shaping policies. And as the media changes, of course, we've had to change with that.
So back when we started, we were working a lot on media consolidation, and then we had, well, now it's the Internet. We're gonna talk about net neutrality, we're gonna talk about internet freedom. And here we are in this media moment where I think everything is combining and colliding together. Where a group like ours that has its origins in press freedom and free speech is suddenly talking about free speech a lot because we're seeing so much government censorship, government shakedowns.
FEATURING LARRY COHEN - An ambitious national program to address homelessness among youth is showing remarkable success. Homelessness is a national crisis, and among young people in particular, traditional solutions are often out of reach. But organizations like that of my next guest are paving the way for an ambitious rethinking of best to support young people with housing needs.
Larry Cohen is Executive Director and Co-Founder ofPoint Source Youth, a national organization working to prevent and end youth homelessness in the U.S. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the program and how it can be scaled.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: How widespread is the problem? If you listen to, for example, the Trump administration, everything's getting better but of course we know that being unhoused is far too common in the United States. And then I imagine for young people the situation is even more dire because they're more vulnerable. What are the statistics around the need for housing among youth?
Larry Cohen: Yeah, so youth homelessness is a national crisis. So 10 percent of all young people experience unstable housing in a given year. And 3.5 million young people are unstably housed. And so, we see it's a growing problem. Also, you know, with economic inequality and other attacks on youth, and we also know that LGBTQ youth and Black, Indigenous Youth of Color are disproportionately represented in youth homelessness, and so those young people are becoming even more at risk of experiencing homelessness.
Kolhatkar: What are some of the reasons why? I mean, there's a broad strokes reason why—you mentioned inequality. So of course, just the financial inability to pay rent or to afford to purchase a home?
Cohen: Yeah, I mean, a lot of it stems from family crisis. Forty percent of young people experiencing homelessness come from the foster care system and then LGBTQ young people are disproportionately represented as well. So what we're seeing is families that are under incredible strain both economically and in other ways, really don't have access to resources and supports and are so fragile that when there's a crisis it's leading to young people experiencing homelessness.
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FEATURING MARGARET KWATENG -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, Margaret Kwateng joins us. She is the Campaign Director atGrassroots Global Justice Alliance, where she shepherded the development of GGJ’s first national campaign, The People’s Care Agenda, a campaign that seeks to both defend communities from attacks and build caring alternatives. Prior to joining GGJ, Margaret worked for years as a community and labor organizer in working class communities of color and with rank and file nurses.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So how do you summarize what your organization is, before we even get into what it does, because as the name suggests, it is an alliance. That means I gather that it's essentially a coalition of numerous organizations. If so, who are these organizations? What defines Grassroots Global Justice Alliance?
Margaret Kwateng: Yeah, absolutely. So, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is an alliance of around 65 community grassroots organizations. And so, by grassroots I mean organizations that are made up of everyday poor and working class people, predominantly people of color who are brought into groups by conversations on the bus at school, on the streets, and then sort of introduced into community efforts that are around improving the conditions.
And the groups that are in Grassroots Global Justice Alliance are all over the country, including in the territories, so in like Puerto Rico and Guam, and are fighting on a whole host of issues from workers' rights to reproductive justice to migrant rights.
But the thing that's really connecting them in Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is this understanding and desire to be a deep relationship with social movements in other parts of the world. Yeah, so that's a little bit about who is in our base. And I'm happy to talk about the work that we do.
Imagine a world where the wealthiest among us are taxed to fund the things we all need--things like independent journalism.To realize such a world, we need... independent journalism.
FEATURING LIZ PERLMAN - The Trump administration and Republican Party’s push to enrich already-wealthy people at the expense of the rest of us is resulting in one of the largest upward wealth transfers in the history of the nation. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill rewards the wealthiest Americans with$2.3 trillion in tax cuts.
Now, activists in states around the country are calling on governors to counter the federal tax cut with state-level taxation of the rich. Already, the state of Massachusetts has been levying taxes on millionaires for a couple of years. But California, home to a disproportionate number of billionaires, is dealing with a governor who is eying the presidency, and resolutely opposing such a tax—this in spite of strong public appetite for taxing the rich. Unions have backed aballot measurein California to levy a one-time 5% tax on billionaires.
Liz Perlman is Executive Director ofAFSCME 3299, representing more than 40,000 service and patient care technical workers at the University of California. She serves on the University of California Berkeley Labor Center Advisory Board and the Bargaining For Common Good Advisory Board, and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what's at stake as the rich continue to get richer.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first talk about the severity of the problem. , the Trump administration floated into its second term by claiming that it was going to be a populist presidency. Trump essentially convinced just enough people in just enough states that he cared about the common man. And of course, most of us who had been paying close attention understood it was exactly the opposite. And this transfer of wealth that he has helped to enact, that he has backed, how severely will it impact people around the country if states don't act? What are we looking at? What are the things that we're going to lose?
Liz Perlman: Well, I think that folks are already feeling it, right? I mean, they've been feeling it and they haven't felt relief on just a day-to-day level cost of living, gas, groceries, whatnot, the cost of housing. And I think with healthcare many people have already seen their premiums skyrocket because of the gap in the tax credits for the ACA. But what the states are facing with the so-called Big Beautiful Bill is that specifically California, and then you can apply it to many other states we're facing a $30 billion cliff in 2027 from some estimates. And, that amounts to 20% of essentially the healthcare infrastructure going away, meaning people will lose coverage and those dollars, right, when you lose people who are on healthcare and those dollars are gone from the healthcare networks and the healthcare system, which are all one system, people don't go to separate hospitals. There's your area hospital, and that's where you're gonna go. And so if 20% of the patients in that area lose their healthcare, there are going to be cuts. That is just the only way these healthcare systems are not, and hospitals, especially rural hospitals can't grow money on trees. And so if they lose those, and we're already seeing those effects everywhere.
FEATURING SHANNON GIBNEY - Nearly six years ago, the people of Minneapolis took center stage in unprecedented protests against racial police terror after George Floyd was videotaped being murdered. Now, the Twin Cities area is once more ground zero for a similar kind of organized racial terror at the hands of armed agents of the state. As ICE agents have run rampant across Minneapolis and St. Paul, killing, maiming, and violating, how have locals responded and fought back?
Shannon Gibneyis a member ofMinneapolis Families for Public Schools. She is also a professor of English at Minneapolis College, where for over fifteen years she has worked with refugees, ex-offenders, international and in-country immigrants, indigenous and communities of color, and students from all walks of life to tell their stories. Her most recent book is “We Miss You, George Floyd.”
Gibney spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how Minnesotans are done playing nice.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So first, the way in which Minnesotans, people in Minneapolis and St. Paul have been responding has certainly made the news for those of us outside. But give us a sense of the, of the tone of the resistance on the ground. I understand that you wrote a story for the Minnesota Star Tribune called Minnesotans seem to be done playing ‘Minnesota Nice.’ What does that mean?
Shannon Gibney: Yeah, so I moved here as a transplant more than 22 years ago, in my late twenties after graduate school, because the state has a wonderful artist’s community and infrastructure for artists. And it's been great for me and my family overall to be here. But I'm a mid-westerner. I was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But, coming here you find this thing called “Minnesota Nice” which is basically like, “oh, we're ‘nice’ in quotes to everyone,” at least on the surface.
But for communities of color and folks from historically marginalized communities, we have a very different experience historically with “Minnesota Nice.” It sort of has been this way to ‘other’ people who don't sort of fit into this kind of old school white Minnesotan rural idea of what it means to be a Minnesotan.
But, I argue in that piece that you mentioned that appeared this weekend in the Star Tribune I argue that since George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings and then now going through the federal agent siege of ICE agents, but also Customs and Border Patrol folks, we're developing a new state ethos. And it's less around Minnesota Nice. And somebody outside the region told me it's like Minnesota Good.
FEATURING MARIA BURNS ORTIZ - In the weeks after the January 7th ICE killing of Renee Good, a Minneapolis mother and wife, protests have continued to escalate in response to the violence of federal agents.
Reports of horrific savagery at the hands of ICE agents against immigrants and citizens, women and men and even babies, are emerging. Rightwing agitators such as Jake Lang have also descended on Minneapolis.
Among those who have been witnessing and documenting the chaos on the streets of the twin cities is Maria Burns Ortiz, a nonprofit executive director, game studio founder and former journalist. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and three children and told Sonali Kolhatkar what she's been witnessing over the past two weeks.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So first, tell me what is it that you have witnessed. What we are seeing here in Southern California, where I'm based, or just news reports, are people like yourself, documenting the abuses, posting it to social media, and it looks terrifying to just even walk on the streets of Minneapolis these days. Give us a sense of what it's like right now.
Maria Burns Ortiz: Yeah, you know, I think it's a very scary time here for a lot of people. Normally it's Minnesota in the winter, where it's cold. But… I keep telling people, and I think people kind of don't understand, what you're seeing? It's actually worse. There is fear within, especially the immigrant community here that, that people are terrified. You know, they are staying in houses, they are going into hiding. This is not an exaggeration. People are being grabbed off the streets. They're being taken when they're dropping their children at the school bus. Multiple cases of this have been reported. There are American citizens being ripped out of their cars, as my husband and I and a number of other citizens saw last week, just off of the streets.
And so, I think that … the [ICE] intent, it feels like, as someone living here, is just as too sow terror. But at the same time, I think also looking at the way that the city, the residents here have responded. I think that's a really important part of it as well, because people are not just taking it and accepting that our neighbors and our friends are being literally ripped from their families and their homes.
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FEATURING HANNAH APPEL -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, Hannah Appel joins us. She is one of the co-founders of theDebt Collectiveand teaches economic anthropology at UCLA and is a proud mother of two children.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's talk about Debt Collective and how you summarize the work that your organization has done. I’ve been familiar with the organization for a long time, and in my mind it's most commonly been associated with tackling student debt, which I suspect is how it started. But now it seems as though you've really expanded your vision, your jurisdiction, if you will, to many different kinds of debt. So, tell us about the broad strokes of Debt Collective.
Hannah Appel: Yeah, absolutely. So, the Debt Collective is the nation's first debtors’ union, and we aim to organize debtors to abolish debts and fight for a world in which everything we need to survive and thrive—housing, education, healthcare—is provided to us without going into often disabling, quite literally disabling debt. And we aim to do that through organizing debtors to build debtor power.
But you are absolutely right that we're best known for our work in student debt. And you are also right, that that’s because that's where we've started, right? That's where our movement initially started. First, organizing folks who had attended for-profit colleges, and it's important to know that they, and very few student debtors are actually in debt to those colleges, right? They're in debt to the federal government, but folks who had been defrauded by for-profit colleges. This is back about a decade ago when we started. Those were the first folks we organized with, and the first folks with whom we had some major victories.
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FEATURING JIM WALSH -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, Jim Walsh, Policy Director forFood & Water Watchjoins us. In his role, Jim works with Food & Water Watch’s policy experts and national allies to develop and implement campaigns to mobilize the public and educate decision makers on strategies that support the development of a better food system, a safe and livable climate, and support safe and clean public water for all.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Jim Walsh: Thank you so much for having me.
Sonali Kolhatkar: So obviously it's in the name and what I just described: “clean food, clean water.” That might be a little vague. How do you explain specifically the work around food and water that your organization does?
Walsh: At Food and Water Watch, we take on corporate forces that are driving up the cost of living and, and putting our health and food at risk. And this is whether it's big tech draining water supplies for massive data centers, pipeline companies pushing dangerous infrastructure into communities or big oil and LNG exporters, rising energy costs or even agribusinesses consolidating power and driving up food prices. The patterns are really the same. You know, corporate profits continue to be put over the interest of the public and people.
And our goal is simple. We want to protect essential life and build a system where decisions are made by those seeking the public interest and not those in corporate boardrooms.
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 forPeople's ActionandPeople's Action Institutejoins 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.
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 atwww.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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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.
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.
FEATURING ANDY LEE ROTH - As Netflix and Paramount makeaggressive bidsto 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 forProject Censoredand its publishing imprint, The Censored Press. He is co-editor of Project’sState of the Free Press 2026and 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 ofVoces de la Fronteraand 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.
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 ofBeyond 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.
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 ofRootsActionand executive director of theInstitute 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 theUnion 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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FEATURING COLLIN REES - Our nation and our world is overrun with 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, my guest is Collin Rees, the U.S. Program Manager atOil Change International. Oil Change is working to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, support grassroots resistance against dirty infrastructure, end public support for oil, gas, and coal, and wind down fossil fuel production with a just and equitable transition.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first talk about the main goal of ending fossil fuels and our reliance on it. This is a huge, huge goal, right? It's as huge as, or perhaps huger than most things that we're talking about, you know, on the scale of fixing democracy, et cetera. And it's also one on which we have so much at stake, the existence of our species. So how do you go about achieving this goal? Give us a sense of your approaches to ending our reliance on oil.
Collin Rees: Yeah. it is not a small goal, and I think we're aware of that but we think it's a really critical one. And I think the flip side, I think we'll talk more about that, the fact that this is so much work needed to make a transition happen, that the way that energy and oil and gas in particular touch our lives happens in so many ways. It's such a sprawling problem to confront, means that we have so many allies and that we can work alongside other movements for justice alongside so many people working to build a better world.
Because at the core, that's what we're working to do. We are working to stop this existential threat to communities and to humanity. But we are doing that in order to build a world where everyone can thrive. And so I think about the work that we do in a couple different spheres.
Specifically, we're a nonprofit. We have some expertise, and in particular, we have a lot of research and data and analysis expertise. So, research and data is one component of what we do.
I wanna be very clear that we do not think research and data alone can defeat the fossil fuel industry. and so we are very clear that that research and data has to be combined with people's movements, with working directly with people's movements to create change.
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 thePrison 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.
TheFederal Bureau of Prisonsreported 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 atwww.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.
FEATURING DINA GILIO-WHITAKER - In August 2022, theAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather for her mistreatment after her 1973 protest speech at the Oscars. Littlefeather shot to fame when Academy Award winner Marlon Brando asked her to decline the award on his behalf. She read a speech about Hollywood’s discrimination against Indigenous people and was booed off stage and blacklisted ever since.
But just days after receiving the Academy’s long-overdue apology, a shocking revelation about Littlefeather raised the fraught question of Indigenous American identity–she was outed as an ethnic fraudster and was revealed to not be who she said she was. The case sparked a new book by Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes). Gilio-Whitaker is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and an independent consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning.
An award-winning journalist as well, she contributes to numerous online outlets including Indian Country Today and the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of multiple books, including As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about her new book,Who Gets to Be Indian? Ethnic Fraud and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American Identity.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I remember being horribly shocked as well when the revelations about Sacheen Littlefeather came out. I was at that time writing a book about narratives and had actually written a whole section in my book about her putting forward a narrative about racial identity, ethnic identity, and native Americanness, and, had to quickly go back and kind of rewrite some aspects of it.
And I also remember you on Facebook—we’re Facebook friends—talking about it, you had a little bit of insight before the rest of the world knew what had really happened with Sacheen Littlefeather. Take us through that. You knew before most people did, that she actually wasn't who she said she was. And that was because you yourself had been fascinated by her story. So, tell us about that.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Right. Well, this is really the, the point of origin for this book. I mean, it's something I've been thinking about all my life because of my own com complex identity issues. But, the book started as a result of my relationship with Sacheen Littlefeather, which began in 2012 when I was writing for Indian Country today.
And, I had gotten to know her. I was asked to write a story about her. It was had to do with a Dennis Miller comment about her, a racial slur. And so, it led to my writing this article about that and meeting her.
After I wrote that article, she asked me if I would be willing to ghostwrite her memoir. She wanted to write this memoir, and this is about a couple years later. And I said, sure, you know, let's explore that. So, it led to this whole experience that I had with her, where we began the process of writing this book together.
FEATURING ANYA ROSE - The November 2025 elections showed Americans are in a mood to tax the rich to fund the things we all need. That sentiment wasn’t just on display in New York City where voters picked a mayor who promises free childcare paid for by taxing the rich, but the state of Colorado where a pair of propositions in a similar vein passed.
Propositions LL and MM passed by wide margins and levy taxes on the wealthiest Coloradans to ensure school kids are fed at no cost to families and that cafeteria workers would be better paid. The ballot measures come in the wake of a massive political battle that saw interruptions to the federal food stamp program.
Anya Rose is the Director of Public Policy at Hunger Free Colorado, a statewide nonprofit that connects people to food resources and drives policy and systems change to end hunger. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how the ballot measures passed and what they mean for Coloradans.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's talk about what these two propositions are. Why were they in two separate propositions to begin with? There's LL and then MM. And since, since you are really in the trenches with this, give us a brief overview of what each of these ballot measures asked of voters.
Anya Rose: Yeah. So, these ballot measures one, there are two of them because of some very particular Colorado laws. But essentially, they are about continuing the Healthy School Meals for All program in Colorado, which was created back in 2022 when voters first agreed to create and fund this program, and has since been wildly popular and, and proven to need some more revenue.
And so, proposition LL is about asking to keep money that has already been raised for this program. That's something we have to do in Colorado because of provisions in our state constitution called the Taxpayer Bill of Rights that are pretty restrictive about how revenue can be raised and used in our state and also determine election provisions.
And then proposition MM, was about raising additional revenue to make sure that the program has long term sustainability and can be fully implemented since some pieces that were really important to community have been on hold.
FEATURING DIEGO FRANCO -Thousands of Starbucks baristas began an indefinite strike on November 13, the so-called “Red Cup day,” a major holiday-season marketing gimmick by the corporate coffee chain. The workers, who are part of the relatively new Starbucks Workers United union, are saying “No Contract, No Coffee,” and are asking members of the public to not cross the picket lines at hundreds of Starbucks cafes around the country until their demands are met.
Franco spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about why Starbucks workers are striking.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I've been following the Starbucks organizing effort for the last few years, relatively speaking. It is a new union when it first burst onto the scene and cafes started organizing one cafe at a time. It drew a lot of attention. I think primarily because Starbucks is such an iconic American brand, is this indefinite strike, meaning it's not just a one-day strike, strike until demands are met, an unfair labor practice strike, is this the first major nationwide strike of this nature that the union has taken on?
Diego Franco: This is not the first nationwide strike, however, this will be the largest strike in the company's history.
Kolhatkar: And so why are people striking? And, and I also should emphasize that this is not the case that all Starbucks cafes are unionized, right? There's a fraction of Starbucks cafes that have unionized, albeit very fast. So, it's just those cafes that have union staff that are on strike and, why are they on strike?
Franco: We are on strike wanting to fight the unfair labor practices and wanting to finish out our contract. Starbucks has been stonewalling us for the past year and don't believe we are deserving of more in our economic package.
And, notoriously, they have invested a lot of money in union busting campaigns, either across the whole country or on a store-by-store basis. And we're simply doing everything we can to fight that.
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FEATURING ANGELA MOONEY D'ARCY - Our nation and our world is overrun with 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 Angela Mooney Darcy, Executive Director and Founder of theSacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoplesjoins us. Angela is from the Acjachemen Nation, the Native Nation whose traditional territories include the area also known as Orange County, California. She has worked with Native Nations, Indigenous peoples, grassroots and nonprofit organizations, artists, educators, and institutions on environmental and cultural justice issues for over twenty-five years.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Angela Mooney D’Arcy: Thank you so much for having me. I started listening to your show when I was in law school years ago, so was very…
Sonali Kolhatkar: Oh my goodness!
D’Arcy: …very, very excited to get your message.
Kolhatkar: Well, we've both been at it for a long time, and I'm glad our paths have intersected. Tell me about the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples. How do you summarize the work that your organization does? What is your main organizational goal?
D’Arcy: Well, our mission is to build the capacity of native nations and Indigenous peoples to protect sacred lands, waters, and cultures. And our goal is to achieve paradigm shifts, to protect Indigenous people so that our peoples and cultures can exist for all time.
And for us, that very much is about protecting all of our human and non-human relatives and the earth herself, because Indigenous people's life ways and relationships with the earth and with all of our relatives around the world is what keeps the world in balance.
And as you indicate in your introduction, right now, we are a world very much out of balance. So, from our perspective, supporting Indigenous peoples in this way, and that paradigm shift actually protects the world for everyone.
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FEATURING GABRIELLE OLIVEIRA - Donald Trump’s second term agenda is centered on the criminalization, scapegoating, incarceration, and disappearance of nonwhite immigrants. And although many Americans seem to have forgotten it, his first term was also marked by the same.
A new book called Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life, follows the stories of 16 migrant families from Latin America who were victims of harsh government enforcement through 2018 and 2019, and how their stories distill the deeply-politicized issue of immigration through a much-needed human lens.
The book's author, Gabrielle Oliveira, is Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar recently about it.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, as I mentioned, a lot of folks forgot the family separation scandal, the horrific kind of human tragedy that unfolded in the years 2016 to 2020. And far too many Americans decided that they could cast their vote for Trump, including people from mixed-status immigrant families. And now we're seeing, I think in escalation even it seems of what happened in the first term.
So, tell me about these families you profiled and why you wrote this book. These were families that were victimized, criminalized and, really traumatized in 2018 and 2019. Why them?
Gabrielle Oliveira: Right. So, I was doing work, you know, at the time I was doing work in schools here in Massachusetts that had bilingual programs, which meant that, you know, children were learning in Portuguese and in Spanish. And that has been, you know, some of the work that I've been doing for my own trajectory, my own career.
And I started hearing during these interviews with families, families describing what had happened to them at the border, either being detained and separated, or detained together. And those stories just seem that, you know, the families were very much still thinking about those stories. The children were bringing those stories to the schools, and the teachers didn't really know what to do with, you know, the stories that were being brought to the school.
So, for me, it was really important to try to capture in real time what was happening and to hear from the families that had just gone through those separations and detentions, either together right, or being sent to different places in the United States.
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FEATURING OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE - The latest United Nations climate conference, COP30, is taking place in Belem, Brazil where nations are still attempting, after decades, to comprehensively tackle climate change and its impacts head on.
While much mainstream American discourse on climate justice is centered on preserving humanity and human lives, a newbriefby theWomen’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN)brings to the forefront a critically important tool for climate justice: the rights of nature, an all-encompassing legal approach to preserving all life.
Osprey Orielle Lake is the Founder and Executive Director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). She sits on the Executive Committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about WECAN's new report.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: The place that I have heard the rights of nature really come up. and, you know, and I think folks who are engaged in the climate justice movement know of Ecuador's case in 2008, I believe it was, that Ecuador essentially changed its Constitution to encompass, to uphold and to preserve the rights of nature.
Using that, using Ecuador as an example, how do you explain what it means when you say the rights of nature?
Osprey Orielle Lake: Well, it's really an important country where rights of nature, as you said, put in 2008 rights of nature to the Constitution. And it's been a growing movement for many years. in the seventies, there was a professor Christopher Stone who put out a document called “If Trees Had Standing,” which in essence basically said, could we have a form of jurisprudence, a way of law that recognized that the natural world could have its own rights?
And it's a really important activity, philosophy, and action for the climate justice movement because, right now, nature does not have standing in a court of law. And so, in the new systems that we have since colonialism, people own property. And so, you have to have the property owner represent a river or a mountain or a forest.
And what rights of nature laws do is they really turn this inside out and upside down, and say, no, we actually are living in a time in which the rivers and the mountains and all of the animals need their own rights to be represented and have their own voice in court of law.
FEATURING YASHICA DUTT - Zohran Mamdani, the unlikely 34-year old Uganda-born, South Asian, Muslim, immigrant is New York City’s new mayor.
Journalist Yashica Dutt, who has closely followed his campaigndescribedlast Tuesday’s election this way: “against all odds, Mamdani — through his gifted political acumen, a brilliant team of 30-something managers, and his exceptional hold over his own narrative and messaging — carved his own space in the political mainstream while the establishment was intent on not giving him an inch.”
How did he do it? Were there missed opportunities? What are lessons we can learn from his campaign and candidacy?
Yashica Dutt is a Dalit journalist and author of the award-winning book on caste, Coming Out as Dalit. She has been covering New York's Mayoral election since April and was the first journalist to extensively cover the South Asian mobilization for the Zohran Mamdani campaign. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what the campaign got right and where it could have done better.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, was it surprising for you? I mean, polls showed that he looked like he was going to win. It would've been shocking if he hadn't, it seems. And still it felt, at least for those of us watching from far off, quite unreal. What was that like on election night? What was the atmosphere in the city?
Yashica Dutt: The atmosphere in the city, not just on election night, but in the weeks before the election was absolutely electric. I have been reporting, like you mentioned, since April, and there was such a stark difference in what we saw during the primary.
Even before the primary election in New York, there was a sense that Mandani could win. As somebody who had been attending all these events and seeing the response from people change towards him in such a dramatic way. I remember I attended this event in Ozone Park, which is a Bangladeshi majority neighborhood here in Queens in New York City, and he literally got mobbed by Desi folks, a lot of people who wanted to get photos clicked with him.
People saw on their Instagram stories that he was there, and they just rushed to see him, to get a glimpse of him. And that was before the primary. So, you can imagine after months of excitement and the polls that really showed him way ahead of Andrew Cuomo, and also the events that he had done.
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FEATURING NOURBESE FLINT - Our nation and our world is overrun with 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 our guest is Nourbese Flint, President ofAll* Above All, and All* In Action Fund, leading their work to build political power and achieve reproductive justice for all.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: What does All above All mean? I get that it's a reproductive justice organization, but that name, I think, an explanation of it can help people understand where you're coming from.
Nourbese Flint: Yeah. So, it's actually a part of our origin story. All above All was created right after the Affordable Care Act passing I think it was in 2008, 2009?
Kolhatkar: 2010, I think.
Flint: Yeah. Whew, I’m like dating myself. But, when it got passed, the kind of compromise was abortion access. So, we still didn't have any federal coverage of abortion. And we had to segment in state coverage for abortion access. And so, some of us got together and kind of had a conversation like we can no longer have and leverage abortion access, particularly abortion access that really impacts folks who are living at the margins, as a tool anymore.
And so, All Above All really leaned into when people say “All,” it's usually with an asterisk, and it's not really all, it's well ‘all accept women of color or all accept LGBT folks or all accept young people.’ And so, we wanted to lean into the All. And when we say All it means all, so All* Above All with the asterisk saying that we are actually putting first the folks that usually are the asterisk at the bottom.
FEATURING JEAN SU - A massive push for data centers around the nation threatens to undermine progress in combating climate change. Our voracious appetite for cloud storage, search engines, and especially artificial intelligence has a serious real-world impact–one that threatens our very existence.
A newreportby theCenter for Biological Diversityoutlines this threat and how it can be addressed. Jean Su is the energy justice director for the Center for Biological Diversity, based in Washington, DC and she shared the report's recommendations with Sonali Kolhatkar.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, of course we've dealt with or lived with, I should say, issues around what powers search engines and cloud storage, and that, in and of itself has been a concern. But just in the last few years, the incredible reliance on artificial intelligence seems to have hypercharged, I think, this impact, particularly as we're seeing Wall Street, you know, new startups, hedge fund investors you know, all of these ventures, including government support being thrown behind this technology that uses massive amounts of energy. How serious is the fossil fuel impact of AI data centers?
Jean Su: So, the fossil fuel impact of data centers is extremely grave and serious. Just to give you a comparison, web services, search engines, all of those things you just mentioned are one 10th of the electricity that's needed to actually fuel AI, artificial intelligence. So that's a huge difference.
What we did was that, we calculated the projected carbon emissions of this surge in an AI boom, and we found the carbon emissions from a primarily fracked gas-powered expansion are incredibly large, and they're so large that they could undermine our national climate target for 2035 by 60% in, in the sense that other sectors would have to actually cut an extra 60% for us to even meet our climate goal of trying to limit greenhouse gases to a livable planet.
FEATURING TOM MOORE - Ask most ordinary Americans what is the biggest source of corruption in elections and many would say “money in politics,” or, if they were really well-informed, “dark money,” or “the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision.” For a long time we’ve accepted the assumption that the only way to undo that 2010 Supreme Court ruling was for Congress to pass legislation doing so or for the court itself to change its mind–both, extremely unlikely scenarios.
Now, voters in Montana are gearing up to ban corporate dark money in their state in 2026 by using a simple and innovative redefinition of what a corporation is. If they succeed, it could open the door for all states to do the same.
Watch Sonali Kolhatkar's post-election analysis on Disinfo Detox with Nolan Higdon.
Tom Moore is a senior fellow for democracy policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. Hiswhite paper on the topichas become the basis for Montana's effort. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about his idea.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first talk about what it was that the ruling itself said. The Supreme Court made this ruling on its own in 2010. It came, seemingly at that time, out of nowhere, caught a lot of folks off guard and has completely changed or worsened, or exacerbated our political system in terms of the influence of money.
What was it that the Supreme Court actually said was now possible starting in 2010?
Tom Moore: Sure. What it said was that if you spend independently in elections without coordinating with the candidate, without talking to them, without plotting any strategy or anything like that, if you do that, then that money can't be corrupting.
So, an unlimited amount of it wouldn't be corrupting either. You know, candidate contributions are okay, you can only give, you know, $3,000, to this campaign or so forth if you're giving directly to a candidate. But if you do it independently, an independent expenditure cannot be corrupting. And so, it can't be regulated. And the court had held in 1976 that really the only reason that we can regulate campaign spending is if it creates corruption or the appearance of corruption.
FEATURING GUILLAUME LONG - For months now, the Trump administration has been building up military hardware in and around theCaribbeanand making inflammatory statements implying an impending war with Venezuela. US airstrikes on ships in the region have killed dozens of people under the dubious claim of illegal narcotics shipments. But, in a recent CBS interview, Trump claimed it was unlikely he would launch a war on Venezuela.
Guillaume Long is a senior research fellow atCenter for Economic and Policy Research. He has held several cabinet positions in the government of Ecuador, including Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Culture, and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent. Most recently, he served as Ecuador’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about why the US is bombing ships in the Caribbean and whether Trump will launch a war on Venezuela.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I feel as though, looking at what Trump is doing in Venezuela, we really need to go back to the very beginning of his term this January, where he signed an executive order declaring drug traffickers to be effectively foreign terrorist: “Designating cartels and other organizations as foreign terrorist organizations, and specially-designated global terrorists.” That was the name of his executive order. Is this what he is drawing from, as far as you can tell, in terms of creating his own authority to, to drop bombs and to make threats against Venezuela?
Guillaume Long: Yeah, I think there's… we have to differentiate a few things. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, naming cartels ‘terrorist organizations’ and, and sort of doubling down on the war on drugs and really sort of heightening and raising the tone of the whole war on drugs, and making that parallel between ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on terror,’ which is not the first time it's been done.
The word ‘narcoterrorism’ goes back now, a couple of decades. It was done under the Bush administration as well. But, doing all this, has been one of the aspects of the Trump administration in the Western Hemisphere, and it's in the US policy towards Latin America. And it's part and parcel of a return to Latin America under a security guise, right?
We are really seeing the United States ‘securitizing,’ I don't really like that verb, but, you know, making security the big deal of the US' approach towards Latin America. It is all about security. Which essentially means US policy towards Latin America right now is all about ‘big stick,’ right? It's about security. It's about, now we're, we're gonna be talking about it. It's about gunboat diplomacy. It's about wielding a big stick and there's not much carrot. It's all about, you know, ‘do this or else.’
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FEATURING ELIEL CRUZ - Our nation and our world is overrun with 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, my guestis Eliel Cruz. He is an award-winning organizer, speaker, and writer and co-founder ofGender Liberation Movement, an organization working towards bodily autonomy and self-determination for all.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Eliel Cruz: Thank you for having me. I love the ‘bigots and billionaires’ line. They are few, we are many. I’m going to use that…
Sonali Kolhatkar: And that's the point I think for us to cast a focus on social justice organizations that I think a lot of people around the country, you know, think, ‘well, what can I do?’ And it turns out there's a lot of things people can do. There's a lot of organizations out there, but not everyone's aware that they're out there, or have heard of them. So, this is our way of profiling groups like yours.
Let's talk about Gender Liberation Movement. How do you summarize the work that your organization does? I mean, the title is pretty revealing, but it is broad. What are the main issues that you work on?
Cruz: Well, the title is broad, purposefully so. So, we are building a lens that's expansive, purposefully, where we can touch on a variety of different issues that gender is a through line for all these issues, whether it be economic justice, climate justice, Palestinian liberation, immigrant justice, reproductive care, gender affirming care, et cetera.
We see our work as a glue between all these various movements. But our work in particular, we do three areas of work. We do direct action and cultural work, media work, and policy work, all responding to these escalating attacks on gender across the spectrum.
Our praxis is trans-centered. we don't consider ourselves a trans advocacy organization. My co-founder, Raquel Willis, is a Black trans activist and writer and media strategist. I'm not trans myself but I have been in LGBTQ spaces doing work for a very long time as a queer person.
FEATURING HAMZA WALKER -A powerful new art exhibit features pieces that are old. So old that many Americans during the 2020 racial justice uprising felt they had no place being revered in public spaces. More than140 statues and monumentsto the Confederacy, and by extension its legacy of white supremacy, slavery, and racism, were toppled between 2015 and 2020. Hundreds more remain standing.
Now, a Los Angeles museum is displaying several of these toppled monuments, some still sporting the graffiti of rage, and one, chopped up and reassembled in a grotesque manner by acclaimed artist Kara Walker.
Hamza Walker is the director ofThe Brickand co-curator of the MONUMENTS exhibition, now on view at The Brick and at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the exhibit and what led to it.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's talk first about this whole controversy around these Confederate era… no, confederate monuments. I wanna clarify, they weren't created or built in during the actual Confederacy. They were built, I understand many of them, of course, they're varied and there's hundreds all over the country, but many of them came up after the Confederacy as a way to keep alive the legacy. And it took many decades then for there to be this national conversation around why we still have these monuments around the country. Is that relatively accurate?
Hamza Walker: Yes, yes. Yes. They went up I mean, part of the narrative is how did they have a journey, right? In the wake of the Civil War, how did these statues make the journey from the cemetery to public spaces? And how did the men that they celebrate and honor go from being traitors to the union to becoming heroes and paragons of virtue? So that's the kind of story of, or trajectory of these confederate monuments in many cases.
But the lion's share of them were built in the late 19th and the first quarter of the 20th century. So between, you know, you could say 1890, you know, 1880, 1980 to 1925, 1930.
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FEATURING FRANK TAMBORELLO - Citing the federal government shutdown as an excuse, President Donald Trump is allowing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to expire. This means about 40 million low income Americans nationwide will lose access to food stamps in November.
Donald Trump’s Department of Agriculture is falsely claiming in a banner at the top of itswebsite, “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry.”
Meanwhile, as states, counties, municipalities, and food pantries scramble to feed millions, advocates and activists declared Tuesday October 28 aSNAP Day of Action.
Frank Tamborello is co-founder and executive director ofHunger Action Los Angeles, whose mission to end hunger and promote healthy eating in Los Angeles County. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what's at stake as food stamps dry up.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: First, let's talk about where there is money. We have 40-42 , million Americans relying on food stamps, which on average works out to less than $200 worth of vouchers that they can redeem for food at grocery stores, sometimes farmer's markets, et cetera. And that is going to get cut off in November. The government is claiming there's no money, but there are emergency funds that are available and that have traditionally, during shutdowns, been mobilized to ensure that there is no cut in funding. What is happening this time around? Why are people gonna lose food stamps in November unless Trump takes action?
Frank Tamborello: So, as you mentioned there's a contingency fund. It's about $5 billion and a month of SNAP benefits for the country is about $9 billion. So, they could at least do a partial allotment for people.
And besides that, we all know that especially this president is very proud of his ability to take executive actions. And so, there are probably numerous other avenues that could be taken to avoid people going hungry. But basically, a political game of chicken is being played and Trump is betting that people will blame the Democrats for the shutdown.
And you pointed out the banner on the USDA website, which is a clear violation of the Hatch Act. In other words, you're not supposed to use your political office for grandstanding in a partisan way, and that's exactly what's happening. So, it's not giving the full story of what the government shutdown is about.
FEATURING DEAN BAKER - On October 28, a month into the federal government shutdown, the United States Senatevoted for the 13th timeon a funding bill to reopen the government. Senate Republicans needed five more Democrats Senators to join them in order to pass the resolution but the opposition party has held firm–for now.
Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump want tostrip government subsidiesfrom health insurance premiums for plans obtained through the Affordable Care Act but Democrats are refusing. Meanwhile, in response to the deadlock, Americans enrolled under the ACA are already being notified of huge increases to their premiums, a real-time demonstration of the GOP’s desires.
Trump and the Republican Party currently have no plan to control rising healthcare costs and early on, pivoted to making wild and false claims about Democrats holding out to preserve insurance coverage for undocumented people.
Dean Bakeris a senior economist at theCenter for Economic and Policy Researchand author of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. He recently wrote aclear explanationof the shutdown and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about it.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I think it's so important for people to really be clear because they're getting such false information from the government. For example, if you go to the USDA's own website right now, at the very top is a banner that says “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as SNAP. Bottom line: The well has run dry.” I mean, that's just the USDA.
And of course, Republicans in the Senate are also making wild claims. They claim that health insurance premiums would rise no matter what.
So, let's talk about what's really going on. What is it that Republicans want to do? What are they holding out for?
Dean Baker: Well, there are two things going on here. One is that they do, as you had mentioned earlier, they wanted to basically gut the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act. They aren't gonna eliminate them altogether 'cause there were subsidies that were put into the act when was first passed back in 2010.
The immediate issue are the expanded subsidies that were put in place under President Biden during the COVID period, which made it much more affordable, both for people at the low ends. You have a lot of people that, in states where they didn't expand Medicaid, where this allowed them to get coverage for free. And these are low-income people, say 130% of the poverty level. So even paying a hundred, $200 a month for insurance was a really big deal. That's what they faced before that. Those were part of the expanded subsidies, which the Republicans wanna eliminate.
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FEATURING AHMAD ABUZNAID - Our nation and our world is overrun with 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, our guest is Ahmad Abuznaid, the Executive Director of theUS Campaign for Palestinian Rightsand USCPR Action. Prior to joining USCPR, Ahmad co-founded the Florida-based Dream Defenders and went on to lead the National Network for Arab American Communities as the Executive Director from 2017 to 2019. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about USCPR's work.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: How do you summarize the work that USCPR does, including the main issue you work on, which of course is Palestine, but how do you summarize the, the, the entirety, if you will, of this issue and what you see as your organizational goals?
Ahmad Abuznaid: Yeah, that's a great question. We are the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and so the title gives you a bit of a sense of what we're about. But in reality, it's deeper than that because since we are in the middle of the United States of America, the biggest backer, the biggest arms provider, and the biggest diplomatic defender of the state of Israel, we actually as tax paying citizens here, have a burden. We have a duty, we have a responsibility, and we should be ending all military aid to the state of Israel. That is our stated mission. That is our stated goal.
And we believe that that accomplishes two things. That ending of military support to the state of Israel would empower the Palestinian people to be in a greater position to determine our self-determination, our liberation, without the United States of America supporting and supplementing and financing Israel's occupation.
But on the other hand, that also would put US taxpayers in a greater position to demand where we would like our taxpayer dollars going towards. You know, I think we often hear time and time again how social security benefits need to be cut because they're too expensive. Healthcare costs cannot be supplemented by the government because it's too expensive. We have infrastructure falling apart in this country. We have teacher salaries that we can't afford and schools that are closing down.
FEATURING AISHA COFFEY - Federal workers are in the midst of a second crisis. After being devastated by mass firings and furloughs from President Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the on-going government shutdown is now jeopardizing pay for those remaining on the payroll.
The federal government employs millions of workers whose jobs entail upholding government services, public safety, enforcing regulations, distributing benefits and more. Now, a new series of shorts called I Do Solemnly Swear, features the voices of government workers pushing back. The series airs on Free Speech TV on Tuesday October 28 at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Eastern.
Aisha Coffey is a strategic communications consultant with over 15 years of experience at federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She is the spokesperson and Communications Director for Federal Workers Against DOGE, a grassroots organization representing more than 1,500 federal employees across over 50 agencies who are advocating for labor protections, effective government and the preservation of democracy.
Aisha Coffey spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the dire situation facing federal workers and how they are speaking out and rising up.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Before we get to the series of shorts that is gonna air on Free Speech TV called, “I Do Solemnly Swear,” let's talk about what workers have been going through, broadly speaking. As I said, millions of workers are employed, and of those, give us a sense of how many have either been fired or furloughed? What are the numbers we're talking about here of people who work for us, who are impacted negatively by the current administration?
Aisha Coffey: I gotta say that's a question we all would like to know the answer to. As you know, the administration came in with a bit of chaos, so we don't exactly have the real solid numbers. We've been unable to get those numbers from any agency even up until now.
We've had to piece together the numbers from what we hear from federal workers from different agencies and, and outside entities that may be trying to keep a tally. By count, right now, the estimate that is that we've lost close to 50,000.
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