WhoWhatWhy's Podcasts
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RadioWhoWhatWhy: The 2008 Crash Was Not a Singular Event
September 14, 2018 10:56 - 22 minutes - 40.5 MBThe holy grail of physics is a unified field theory that somehow explains both the micro and macro aspects of how the world works. The same holds true for what Thomas Carlyle called the “dismal science” of economics, as we seek to understand the causes and consequences of the 2008 financial meltdown. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with economic historian Adam Tooze, professor of history at Columbia University and award-winning author, about a reinterpretation of ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Global Elite's Efforts to Change the World
September 12, 2018 10:50 - 31 minutes - 57.7 MBIt is an accepted axiom of modern life that disruptive change is all around us. Almost every aspect of our lives has been altered irrevocably in recent years. In this process there have been winners and losers, just as in every other great social upheaval. This time, however, the consequences have been even more profound, leading in large measure to the social dislocation, anger, and fear we see today. Part of the reason is that the disrupters, who created so much of the change, and got...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Voter Suppression 101
September 07, 2018 11:08 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MBWhile widespread voter fraud may be a figment of President Donald Trump’s imagination, it should never be confused with voter suppression, which is very real. Two months out from the midterm elections, the basic rights of millions of Americans are under threat. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman is joined by Carol Anderson, the Chair of African American studies at Emory University and an authority on voter suppression — especially of the efforts to disenfranchise African ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Quagmire in Afghanistan: 17 Years and Counting
August 31, 2018 10:55 - 29 minutes - 53.5 MBFor the US, Afghanistan is a little like Alice in Wonderland: it takes all the running we can do, just to stay in the same place. In a little over a month, it will be 17 years since the US led an invasion of Afghanistan. It’s the country's longest war, but only one phase in the 40 years of war that have been a part of contemporary Afghanistan. Many Americans, especially with the amount of news being generated lately, have forgotten why their country went there, what role the US still mig...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: How Corporations Force States to Stifle Local Rule
August 28, 2018 10:49 - 29 minutes - 11.8 MBIn July, California’s legislature and governor faced an elegant — and legal — extortion threat. The American Beverage Association, funded by Coke and Pepsi, demanded immediate passage of legislation that preempts any soda taxes imposed by county or local governments for the next 12 years. If Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and the Democratic-controlled legislature refused, Big Soda would go forward with a ballot initiative this November that would severely limit any future tax increases at local and co...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Temp Work: The Waste Product of the Service Economy?
August 24, 2018 10:40 - 27 minutes - 24.9 MBThe financial insecurity facing so many Americans in today’s gig economy is not the result of startups and their new apps, or even of technology in general. Temp work is the result of four decades of deliberate decisions by executives in corporate America — decisions that changed the nature of work and of capitalism itself. So explains Louis Hyman — a professor of economic history at Cornell, and Jeff Schechtman’s guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast. Hyman takes us back to the 1960s ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Case for Optimism as Intellectually Fashionable
August 20, 2018 10:53 - 26 minutes - 24.1 MBWe live in an age of paradox. According to study after study, almost everything we can measure is moving in a positive direction. Worldwide, there is less violence, less pollution (except for greenhouse gases), less war, greater longevity, and most diseases are declining. From the perspective of material living standards, in every part of the world, things are getting better. But there is another side. Diseases that were once a death sentence are now manageable, but health care costs are...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Next Generation of Conservatives Is Hoping to Make Its Mark… After Trump
August 17, 2018 10:52 - 29 minutes - 27 MBSome days it seems, at least from reading the mainstream news or cable television, that all millennials are voting for Democrats, or that college-educated kids are all going to be part of the “blue wave.” In fact, there is a whole cadre of young Republicans and conservatives populating college campuses, who see themselves as the post-Trump future of the Republican Party. Journalist Eliza Gray recently went looking for the heart and soul of young conservatism as part of a story for the W...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Iran Nuclear Deal and the View From Tehran
August 10, 2018 10:48 - 32 minutes - 58.8 MBSeyed Hossein Mousavian is a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton. A former Iranian ambassador to Germany, he was the chief spokesman for Iran during its nuclear negotiations with the international community. Several years ago, he parted ways with the Iranian government. This week he joins Jeff Schechtman for our WhoWhatWhy podcast. Mousavian sets the stage with a look at Iran’s reaction to the Trump administration’s decision to withd...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Mouth That Roared — How Rush Limbaugh Changed America
August 07, 2018 10:42 - 29 minutes - 54.8 MBFrom long before the rise of Fox News, talk radio has been the essential medium through which millions and millions of hard-core conservatives comprehend the world. From its inception, talk radio has been built around codes of tribal identity, grievances, and scorn. Originally tapped as entertainers, talk show hosts soon learned to mobilize public anger in ways that boosted their listenership enormously. Talk radio’s modern era began 30 years ago this month, with the national launch of Rus...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: GDP = Greatly Deceptive Prosperity
July 30, 2018 10:47 - 25 minutes - 46.5 MB“It’s the economy, stupid.” Those words have become ingrained into our politics. But seldom have we seen such a disconnect between raw data, the kind that President Donald Trump bragged about on Friday, and the economy people are actually living in. Journalist Alissa Quart, in her new book Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, went looking for the real America. In this WhoWhatWhy podcast she talks to Jeff Schechtman about what she found. She discovered an America that is a far...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Putin's Indecent Proposal
July 25, 2018 10:52 - 24 minutes - 22.5 MBLast week, Russian President Vladimir Putin singled out 12 Americans he’d like to see the US hand over to Russia for interrogation in exchange for allowing special counsel Robert Mueller to question the 12 Russian GRU agents he recently indicted. Of those, much attention focused on former US Ambassador Michael McFaul. (WhoWhatWhy also interviewed McFaul just a few days ago.) But Putin singled out, even more prominently, international businessman Bill Browder, a major force behind the pas...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: There Is More at Stake in WikiLeaks Showdown Than Assange’s Fate
July 24, 2018 10:41 - 35 minutes - 14.2 MBAs Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, visits London, reports indicate he is about to withdraw asylum for Julian Assange, exposing the WikiLeaks founder to eventual extradition to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act. State Department veteran Peter van Buren joins Peter B. Collins for this Radio WhoWhatWhy interview. Acknowledging the imperfections of Assange, van Buren makes the case that Americans, and especially journalists, should support Assange’s right to publish....
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Michael McFaul Talks Putin, Russia, and the Alt-Right
July 20, 2018 10:37 - 20 minutes - 19.1 MBRussia, Russia, Russia. Not since the darkest days of the Cold War has our gaze been so resolutely focused on the land of the Czars. And yet with all of that focus, it’s amazing how much we don’t understand about the country and its people. Michael McFaul, US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, is suddenly front and center in the latest Trump/Putin controversy. At their recent summit, Putin is said to have made Trump an offer: The US could pose questions to Russian military intelligenc...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: What Connects FIFA, the World Cup, Trump, Mueller, Comey, Putin, and Christopher Steele?
July 13, 2018 10:33 - 28 minutes - 26 MBYou may remember that back in May of 2015, senior FIFA officials were arrested on corruption charges in Zurich. Those arrests rocked the foundations of the world's most popular sport. But little did we know at the time that the case was so wide-ranging and complex that its reverberation involved the FBI, the IRS, Donald Trump, Christopher Steele, Robert Mueller, James Comey, and Vladimir Putin. As the final of the World Cup is played in Russia this weekend, the WhoWhatWhy podcast features ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: When a Virus Hops on a Plane
July 06, 2018 10:37 - 31 minutes - 28.7 MBIt sounds like it should be the beginning of a joke: A virus walks onto a plane… Only it’s not a joke. It’s how a global pandemic can start. One that could be far more immediate and deadly than our twin fears of climate change or nuclear proliferation. The recent outbreak of Ebola in the Congo is a grim reminder not only of the 2014 West African outbreak, but of the much wider dangers of the global spread of infectious diseases — diseases that know no walls, no travel bans, and respond onl...
Radio WhoWhatWhy: Prosecutors Who Break the Law Face No Punishment
July 03, 2018 10:20 - 30 minutes - 12.1 MBWhat happens when prosecutors break the law? Almost nothing. Nina Morrison is a senior attorney with the Innocence Project in New York, and in this podcast she explains how homicide prosecutors like Glenn Kurtzrock face few consequences when caught concealing exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys. Kurtzrock — who was fired by the district attorney in Suffolk County, NY, after his misconduct was exposed — has never been charged with a crime, and has not faced any disciplinary action f...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Age of Political Persuasion Is Over
June 29, 2018 10:59 - 30 minutes - 48.3 MBMillennials are on the rise, both on the left and the right. But their trajectories have been very different. The young left has had unquestioned triumphs, including Tuesday’s New York primary, where a 28-year-old Latina and Democratic Socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, defeated a 20-year Democratic incumbent congressman and supposed heir apparent to Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). The activism of the anti-gun-violence Parkland students is another example of young people on the left being energized...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Ugly Truth of America’s ‘Whites Only’ Immigration System
June 22, 2018 01:08 - 26 minutes - 47.8 MBWe always hear that the US is “a nation of immigrants.” But, according to immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky, this hides the real truth about America’s immigration history. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Chomsky, a professor at Salem State University in Massachusetts, places the current debate about immigration in America in a broader historical context. Chomsky outlines the 20th century policies that changed traditional patterns of migration and labor, and replaced them with ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Oligarchy Is as Dangerous as the Soviets
June 15, 2018 10:48 - 28 minutes - 26.2 MBDuring the Cold War the United States fought to defend its political system against the threat of Communism. But times have changed. Does the US now have to defend its republic and its democracy against the threat of a new Gilded Age, of oligarchs — and the dangerous consequences of deep income inequality? Vanderbilt law professor and former Senate staffer Ganesh Sitaraman argues that, in a political system like that of the US, which was designed to be class-blind, widening the economic ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Google’s Deep Involvement With the Pentagon
June 12, 2018 10:38 - 31 minutes - 12.6 MBGoogle’s contract with the Pentagon for Project Maven — a controversial drone imaging program that uses artificial intelligence — prompted over 4,000 Google employees to sign a petition opposing the project, and about a dozen workers resigned in protest. In response, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced that the contract will not be extended, and that “there will be no follow-on to Maven.” Yasha Levine has covered Silicon Valley for years, and his new book Surveillance Valley: The Secr...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Chernobyl: The Nuclear Disaster That Helped Destroy a Regime
June 08, 2018 10:55 - 43 minutes - 17.4 MBWhen the Chernobyl nuclear accident rattled the world and destroyed the myth of safe nuclear power in 1986, Serhii Plokhy was a young history professor who lived downwind from the power plant. Soviet leaders reflexively covered up the deadly incident but were forced to reveal some information because Sweden and other countries detected radiation from the releases at Chernobyl. Today, Plokhy is professor of Ukrainian history and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. His n...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Bobby Kennedy’s Reaction to Seeing Hunger Up Close in America
June 06, 2018 10:47 - 31 minutes - 57.5 MBIn 1967, Robert Kennedy knelt in a crumbling shack in Mississippi, watching a toddler pick rice and beans off a dirt floor. It had been three years since President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his war on poverty. What Kennedy saw on that trip would, in part, drive his run for the presidency one year later. In this special WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to longtime journalist and University of Mississippi professor Ellen Meacham about the profound impact that Kennedy’s 1967 trip to...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Unique Recollections of the Night RFK Was Gunned Down
June 05, 2018 16:11 - 48 minutes - 44.4 MBMany people doubt the official story of what happened when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel exactly 50 years ago. Their doubts are fuelled by painstaking research, solid reporting, and even cutting-edge science. But nothing compares to talking with people who were there when Kennedy was struck down. Paul Schrade, a long-time friend and political ally of Kennedy’s, was shot in the head that night, but he recovered from his wounds. Two y...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Remembering RFK: A Tonic for Our Times
June 04, 2018 10:50 - 28 minutes - 26.1 MBIn this special WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman speaks with author and host of MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews. During a long career in Washington he rubbed shoulders with the Kennedys — whom he has been talking and writing about for years — and now he turns his full attention to Bobby. Matthews argues that Bobby’s politics were rooted in bringing people together. Of course, there’s no way of knowing what his presidency might have been like. But Matthews reminds us of the crowds that ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: No Matter How Bad Things Seem, 1968 Was Worse
June 01, 2018 10:38 - 24 minutes - 44.8 MBJust how bad are things today? Let’s compare. Exactly 50 years ago, the Vietnam War was raging — the Tet offensive had begun and 30,000 more troops went to Vietnam while the war dead were returning home in body bags. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, race riots broke out in almost every large city in America, and one political party’s convention became a domestic war zone. In Europe, Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring was crushed by a bellicose Soviet Union. Even before...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: A Memorial Day Look at Those Who Fought in Korea
May 25, 2018 10:49 - 17 minutes - 32.2 MB“What would you want if you could have any wish?” asked the photojournalist of the haggard, bloodied Marine before him. The Marine gaped at his interviewer. The photographer snapped his picture, which became the iconic Korean War image. Finally, the soldier revealed his wish: “Give me tomorrow,” he said at last. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with military historian Patrick O’Donnell, who wrote a book about the war almost a decade ago, entitled “Give Me Tomorrow...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: One Belt One Road: China’s Marshall Plan for the World
May 18, 2018 10:57 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MBThe recent Chinese investment in Donald Trump's hotel project in Indonesia is just one in a long string of Chinese ventures across the globe. This deal, between a Chinese state-owned company and an Indonesian developer, falls under the umbrella of China’s One Belt One Road initiative. One Belt One Road is an ambitious effort to spread the country’s money and influence around the world. The Chinese see it as an extension of their foreign policy: projecting soft power through the financing a...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: If Gina Haspel Is Confirmed, Will CIA Torture Begin Anew?
May 15, 2018 10:29 - 14 minutes - 13 MBIn spite of a Senate hearing in which Gina Haspel repeatedly evaded tough questions about her views on torture, it appears that she will be confirmed as the new CIA director. Enough senators were apparently mollified by her qualified assurances that there will be no more “enhanced interrogation” at the spy agency on her watch. But John Kiriakou, who as a CIA insider exposed the original torture program in — and ironically was the only government official who went to prison over the issue —...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Did US Deploy Bioweapons During Korean War?
May 14, 2018 10:52 - 46 minutes - 18.5 MBIn 1952, in the early stages of the Korean War, North Korea accused the United States of using biological weapons — a claim the US has always denied. Journalist and retired psychologist Jeffrey Kaye found a copy of a report by the International Scientific Commission on the issue, originally released in 1952. Its investigation concluded that the US used a number of biological weapons, including anthrax, plague, and cholera, and that the confessions of many captured American airmen provided ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Globalization — the Economics Work, the Politics Do Not
May 11, 2018 10:49 - 28 minutes - 26 MBGlobalization has created a true global middle class, brought millions out of poverty, reduced the price of goods, and created remarkable economic benefits. As an economic system, it has worked exactly as promised. On the other hand, globalism, as a political idea, has been a dismal failure. This is according to Eurasian Group CEO and global analyst Ian Bremmer. In his conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about what connects so many of the global problems we face today, Bremmer m...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Syria 101 — The Basics on the Superpower Flashpoint
May 04, 2018 10:48 - 21 minutes - 49.7 MBThe Middle East has been a seething cauldron of conflict since 1918. Twice in the 20th century, in 1967 and 1973, it almost became a flashpoint for nuclear war. The region has always been a chessboard where great powers play out their strategies. In today’s Syria, it’s the US vs. Russia vs. Jihadists plus Saudi Arabia vs. Israel plus Turkey vs. the Kurds, not to mention Iran and Syria vs. the rebels. No wonder the country has been devastated, leaving behind an almost unimaginable humanitar...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Final Word on the JFK Assassination: There Will Never Be a Final Word
May 01, 2018 10:33 - 30 minutes - 68.7 MBSome people may know where bodies are buried; Rex Bradford knows where all the papers are buried. The leading archivist and historian of the records of the JFK assassination has a lot to say in his talk with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman. According to Bradford, the recently released 19,000+ pages are interesting, but in no way dispositive. What they reveal, more than anything else, is further evidence of how so many cover-ups — for so many reasons, by so many groups, agencies, and individua...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Spy University: How Intelligence Agencies Recruit Their Next Generation
April 27, 2018 10:51 - 30 minutes - 69.1 MBDuring the Cold War, our elite universities were a breeding ground for future spies. Schools like Yale and Harvard provided some of the “best and the brightest” to America's intelligence agencies. Today, the CIA and FBI are using college campuses once again to gain new recruits in the global war for clandestine information and technology. These government agencies, in many instances, are working with the full support and blessing of professors and often top university administrators, who r...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: A Universal Basic Income Will Save the Country
April 23, 2018 10:35 - 27 minutes - 44.5 MBIt may very well be that Donald Trump is president because, in the last few years, four million jobs were automated out of existence in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In Michigan alone, 40 percent of workers who lost manufacturing jobs ended up on disability. According to tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, labor force participation remains low and the glowing unemployment statistics we hear are woefully out of line with what’s really going on. Every day more and more repetitive jobs, b...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Pulse Nightclub Trial Attorney Slams Government Misconduct
April 20, 2018 10:50 - 51 minutes - 20.8 MBCharles Swift is director of the Dallas-based Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America. He led the defense team in the month-long Orlando trial of Noor Salman, the widow of Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen. Swift has an enviable record of success in securing justice for unpopular clients. As a Navy judge advocate general, Swift was a member of the defense bar at Guantánamo Bay, where his advocacy won freedom for a Yemeni detainee in a precedent-setting Supreme Court ruling. Fo...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Internet Is Killing Democracy
April 13, 2018 10:45 - 20 minutes - 46.1 MBWe have seen endless stories about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. We have endured two days of Mark Zuckerberg explaining the Facebook business model. Social media and its role in politics is on everyone's mind. However, none of the current clamor speaks to the broader impact of the internet, or of big tech in general. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jamie Bartlett, director of the Center for Analysis of Social Media, reminds Jeff Schechtman that the internet was supposed to be a demo...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Earth Is on the Verge of Collapse — Is Eco-Socialism the Only Answer?
April 09, 2018 10:41 - 36 minutes - 57.8 MBWe are facing planet-wide extinction, a climate emergency — and our current course is suicidal. That is the underlying belief of author and scientist Richard Smith, who is Jeff Schechtman’s guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast. Smith believes that our current model of capitalism, with virtually unlimited growth and consumption, cannot sustain a planetary population of nine billion people. He tells Schechtman that we do not need most of what we consume, and that our current behavior mu...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Plot to Kill King
April 04, 2018 19:12 - 27 minutes - 63.7 MBThe evidence that James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King is overwhelming. As the Washington Post recently pointed out, famed attorney William Pepper stands astride all of the information and work that has uncovered the truth. Pepper was a friend of King in the last years of his life. Some years after King's death, Pepper went on to represent James Earl Ray in his guilty plea and subsequent conviction. But Pepper believes that Ray was framed by the FBI, the CIA, the military, the M...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: How the FBI Used a Famous Black Photographer to Spy on Martin Luther King
April 04, 2018 10:48 - 30 minutes - 69.4 MBLongtime Memphis journalist Marc Perrusquia spent years investigating the story of how a famous African American photographer, with remarkable access, played a key role in the civil rights movement, all while being an informant for the FBI. Ernest Withers’s photography captured some of the most stunning moments of the civil rights era: including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first integrated buses in Montgomery, AL, and the blood flowing into King’s room from the balcony at...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The 75-Year-Old Book That Drives Our Politics
March 30, 2018 10:45 - 21 minutes - 48.6 MBBe it privatizing the Veterans Administration, railing against “socialized medicine,” gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, or trying to starve public education, the proponents of these ideas all seem to be beholden to the work of Ayn Rand. Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, was published 75 years ago this month, after being turned down by 12 publishers. Yet for people like Paul Ryan, Stephen Miller, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Peter Thiel, it might as well have been a briefing paper publ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Intel Expert James Bamford Blasts Russiagate Hype
March 26, 2018 10:34 - 44 minutes - 17.8 MBAuthor and intelligence expert James Bamford says the reports of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, which is being treated as one of the biggest stories out there right now, are overblown. So far, Bamford argues, no evidence has been presented that this is anything other than the type of intelligence gathering or operation that countries are engaged in all the time. Bamford is critical of the hyped, 24/7 coverage of Russiagate. Indeed, he sees widespread hacking by Russia, the...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Chinese Emperor Has No Clothes: The Truth About the Chinese Economy
March 23, 2018 10:41 - 32 minutes - 73.8 MBThe Dow Jones plummeted Thursday over concerns that President Donald Trump is plunging the US in a trade war with China. Such a conflict is widely expected to harm US consumers. But what about the Asian superpower? What if the Chinese Emperor has no clothes? Remember back in the 1970s when Americans were afraid of the Japanese economy taking over? When they bought great American assets and real estate? In fact, all that fear and anxiety were misplaced. The same may be true today with respe...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The ‘Godmother of Torture’ May Soon Be Running the CIA
March 19, 2018 10:37 - 14 minutes - 34.1 MBThe recent revisionist history about Gina Haspel, Trump's nominee for CIA director, should make very little difference in examining the totality of her record on torture and its cover up. According to John Kiriakou, a 15-year CIA veteran, and the whistleblower on the CIA covert torture operation, Gina Haspel is the “godmother of the torture program.” Regarding ProPublica's correction of the record of her involvement, Kiriakou says that while she may not have actually overseen the torture...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Former Knesset Speaker: The Israel of 1948 Is Over
March 16, 2018 10:33 - 24 minutes - 55.8 MB“Israel as a country should be appreciated and celebrated,” Avraham Burg says, but it should no longer be looked upon as the land of “oranges and equality.” You might think those comments come from an anti-Israel professor at an elite US university. Instead, Avraham Burg is part of Israel’s history. His father was a member of the founding generation. Burg served as Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and in the Labor government of Shimon Peres before retiring from politics in 2004. This per...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Growing Neo-Nazi Group Atomwaffen Implicated in 5 Murders
March 12, 2018 10:48 - 37 minutes - 25.8 MBReporter A.C. Thompson details his investigation of Atomwaffen, a growing neo-Nazi and murderous white supremacist group with heavily armed members in about 20 American cities. Founded and run by young, white males, the group has expanded in the wake of the protests last year in Charlottesville, VA. One member, Samuel Woodward, is charged in Orange County, CA, with the January 2018 murder of 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein — a gay, Jewish college student. Related: What Five ‘Domestic Terr...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Can School Shooters Be Profiled and Shootings Averted?
March 07, 2018 11:39 - 24 minutes - 22.3 MBThe media and the public focus on the school shootings that resulted in fatalities and casualties. However, many potential massacres are headed off by savvy interventions. What can we learn from those?
RadioWhoWhatWhy: How Trump’s Controversies Distract from America’s Real Problems
March 02, 2018 11:41 - 24 minutes - 22.8 MBIn this wide-ranging podcast, Barrett Brown and actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter talk about the complacency that ails so much of American society. They also discuss how, instead of fixing the systemic problems that plague the US, people across the political spectrum are focusing on the sideshow that President Donald Trump provides. In the meantime, however, all the institutions that are in dire need of reform are neglected — making the job of fixing them in the future even more ...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Private Prisons Make a Buck with Inhumane Treatment of Immigrants
February 26, 2018 11:58 - 41 minutes - 16.5 MBThe US government is currently holding about 400,000 men and women in a patchwork of immigration prisons. Some are kept in corporate facilities that are guaranteed a minimum number of prisoners daily; others are in cells leased from county jails and other lockups. Carlos Hidalgo has spent two stretches at California’s Adelanto Detention Facility, where he witnessed food with maggots, guards having sex with inmates, easy access to drugs, and difficult access to legal counsel and family mem...
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Free Speech Wars: Has the First Amendment Outlived Its Usefulness?
February 23, 2018 11:57 - 25 minutes - 23.7 MBThe traditional American notion of almost absolute freedom of speech may have run its course. Journalist and academic Damon Linker says some Americans may be having second thoughts about what we’ve come to accept as free speech. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, he talks to Jeff Schechtman about his recent analysis that found free speech is under siege from all sides. Linker notes what’s happening on college campuses, where arguments over diversity are polarizing students and faculty, ...