Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
For more than two years, the world has witnessed not only a devastating war in Gaza, but also a fierce battle over how that war has been covered in the media. We’ve seen headlines repeated before facts were verified. We’ve seen civilian deaths described in passive language that obscures responsibility. We’ve watched journalists, students, doctors, and even U.N. officials dismissed or marginalized when their accounts challenged official narratives – sometimes costing their lives.
All the while, independent reporting and social media footage taken by individuals on the ground show a different reality than the Israeli and US government narratives that dominate corporate media coverage. So what happens when the press stops acting as a watchdog and instead becomes an amplifier for state power? How can the public make informed moral decisions when reporting is shaped by concentrated political and corporate interests? And what obligations do journalists have when governments are pushing narratives in times of war?
Guest – Robin Andersen is a professor, media critic, and longtime scholar of war propaganda and political communication. Her new book, The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, examines how major U.S. media institutions covered the war after October 7th, 2023 and how corporate journalism helped manufacture public consent for catastrophic violence while, at the same time, narrowing the scope of speech and debate.
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The Future Of Cash Bail Reform
The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” has stood at the center of the criminal legal system in the United States for centuries. But in the real world, enjoying freedom before a trial has often depended less on guilt or innocence — and more on money. According to the Prison Policy Initiatives, among other sources, at least 400,000 people are in jail awaiting trial. In other words, they are legally innocent and have not been convicted of a crime, but remain behind bars. Many are there because they cannot afford to pay bail.
Supporters of the cash bail system claim it ensures people return to court for their trial, and therefore protects public safety. Critics, including our next guest, point to the unfairness of cash bail: it punishes poverty, pressures people into guilty pleas, tears apart families, and deepens racial and economic inequality. Out of this evolving debate, the bail reform movement was born. And on April 30, 2026, the California Supreme Court gave the bail reform movement the fortification it needed.
In the closely watched case In re Kowalczyk, the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed constitutional limits on pretrial detention and expanded on earlier rulings that challenged wealth-based incarceration. The decision is already being viewed as one of the most significant state court rulings on bail and pretrial liberty in recent years — with possible implications far beyond California.
Guest – Carson White, arson is a supervising attorney at Civil Rights Corps where she raises systemic challenges to the criminalization of poverty. She currently leads CRC’s California Writ Project, which trains public defenders statewide and has litigated hundreds of pretrial habeas petitions raising the issues ultimately decided by In re Kowalczyk. Carson is a graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of Texas at Austin.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Right To Dissent, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Guilty of Genocide
For decades, activists in the United States have argued that racial violence, political repression, and systemic inequality are not simply domestic issues. They’re also violations of international human rights law. A new collection, Guilty of Genocide, revisits that argument through the lens of the 2021 International Tribunal on U.S. Human Rights Abuses Against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples. The book gathers testimony, legal analysis, poetry, artwork, and organizing documents from a landmark people’s tribunal convened by the Spirit of Mandela Coalition.
After hearing testimony on policing, incarceration, political prisoners, environmental racism, and colonialism, an international panel of jurists delivered a sweeping verdict finding the United States guilty of multiple human rights abuses.
Guest – Matt Meyer an internationally recognized peace educator, author, and activist. He was nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize alongside the International Peace Research Association in recognition of his lifelong commitment to nonviolence and global peace education. Author of more than a dozen books, including Guns and Gandhi in Africa, Matt has played a major role in building international peace studies and justice networks across Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America.
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A Look Back At The Inception Of New York City’s Panopticon
When Law and Disorder first interviewed privacy activist Bill Brown in 2005, the landscape of surveillance in New York City — and across the United States — was already alarming. Bill was warning us about hundreds of NYPD cameras going up in Brooklyn, federal Homeland Security dollars flooding into local surveillance infrastructure, and the proposed “ring of steel” around lower Manhattan modeled on London’s vast camera network. What seemed like a dire warning then looks almost quaint today.
In the years since, mass surveillance has expanded in ways that would have been difficult to imagine. Amazon’s RING doorbell cameras, now installed on tens of millions of private homes, have become a vast, crowd-sourced surveillance network — with police departments across the country routinely requesting footage from residents, sometimes without a warrant. Meanwhile, a newer and perhaps even more insidious technology has taken hold: FLOCK Safety cameras, license plate readers now deployed in thousands of communities, logging the movements of ordinary Americans going about their daily lives and making that data available to law enforcement across jurisdictions. Add to this the explosion of facial recognition technology, social media monitoring, and AI-driven predictive policing tools, and the surveillance state Bill Brown cautioned us about has arrived in full force.
But Americans are pushing back. Civil liberties organizations including the ACLU have won outright bans on government use of facial recognition in cities including San Francisco, Boston, and Portland. Community organizers have successfully blocked FLOCK camera contracts in several cities after exposing how the data is shared and retained. And a growing movement of digital rights advocates, tenant organizations, and privacy activists continues to fight surveillance expansion at the local, state, and federal level — carrying on exactly the kind of work Bill Brown was urging listeners to take up all those years ago.
Since 2006, New York City’s surveillance infrastructure has evolved from a fragmented network of video cameras. It’s now an integrated, intelligence-driven system powered by the Domain Awareness System (DAS) and advanced biometric tools. The NYPD’s intelligence and counterterrorism budget quadrupled from $83 million in 2006 to $349 million in 2021, enabling the deployment of technologies originally designed for counterterrorism to monitor routine street crime and protests. These include facial recognition software, license plate readers, and mobile X-ray vans.
The scale of physical surveillance has expanded dramatically. By 2021, Amnesty International estimated more than 15,000 police cameras in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn alone, up from roughly 2,400 visible cameras in Manhattan in 1998. This network is further augmented by cellphone surveillance tools like Stingray trackers and cell tower dumps. Those allow police to identify individuals at protests or public gatherings without warrants.
This evolution has created a surveillance state that disproportionately impacts communities of color. There’s a well-documented correlation between surveillance density and higher rates of stop-and-frisk incidents in minority neighborhoods. Police maintain that these tools are essential for solving crimes and preventing attacks — but the lack of public oversight and the use of data scraped from social media have intensified debates over privacy rights and racial bias in policing.
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genocide, Human Rights
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This year, U.S.-Armenian relations made headlines in a revealing way. In February 2026, Vice President JD Vance became the first sitting U.S. vice president to visit Armenia. His office posted”then swiftly deleted”a message saying he was at the Armenian Genocide Memorial to “honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide.” The White House called it a staff error. A replacement post went up with all mention of the word “genocide” stripped out. When pressed, Vance called the massacre “a very terrible thing that happened a little over 100 years ago””and left it there.
The visit wasn’t only about remembrance. Vance and Prime Minister Pashinyan signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement worth up to $5 billion in initial U.S. exports” part of a broader push to pull Armenia out of Russia’s orbit. Vance then traveled to Azerbaijan, advancing plans for a U.S.-backed trade and transit corridor aimed at bypassing both Russia and Iran. It’s a familiar pattern: Armenia is valuable enough to court as a geopolitical piece on Washington DC’s chessboard, but not important enough to have its genocide named out loud because that may upset Turkey, the NATO ally whose cooperation is needed more.
It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
Censorship, Civil Liberties, Freedom Of Speech, Human Rights, Iran, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary and an Evangelical Christian, has explicitly framed the Iran war through the lens of his religious faith, weaving scripture into his remarks, praying for “overwhelming violence” against his enemies and insisting that God stands with the U.S. against Iran, a Muslim-majority nation of some 90 million people. The ex-Fox News host has long worn his faith on his sleeve — and on his flesh. He has a large Jerusalem cross tattooed on his chest and the words “Deus Vult,” a rallying cry used by the Crusaders, which means “God wills it,” are inked on his arm. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth rejected the principle of separation of church and called it “leftist folklore.” At a prayer breakfast on Feb. 6, he said that the U.S. “remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it.”
Hegseth told CBS News on March 6: “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops.” When asked if he views the conflict in a religious context, Hegseth responded: “I’m a man of faith, who encourages our troops to lean into their faith.” During a press briefing on the war four days later, he quoted Psalm 144, stating, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.” Last week, while hosting a Pentagon prayer service, Hegseth implored God to: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation” and asked that “wicked souls be delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.”
Guest – Mikey Weinstein has been described by Harper’s magazine as “the constitutional conscience of the U.S. military, a man determined to force accountability.” Mikey’s family has a long and distinguished U.S. military history spanning three consecutive generations of military academy graduates and over 130 years of combined active duty military service. Mikey is a lawyer and a 1977 Honor Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy.
A registered Republican, Mikey spent over three years working for the Reagan Administration as legal counsel in the White House. In 2006, he founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) to battle the influence of far-right militant radical evangelical religious fundamentalists in the US military.He’s the author of two books “With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military” and “No Snowflake in an Avalanche: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, its Battle to Defend the Constitution, and One Family’s Courageous War Against Religious Extremism in High Places.”
In 2011, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State presented Mikey with AU’s first ever Person of the Year Award, calling him “the leading voice protecting church-state separation in the military.” In December 2012, Defense News named Mikey one of the 100 Most Influential People in U.S. Defense. He was also named one of the 50 most influential Jews in America by the Forward, one of the nation’s preeminent Jewish publications. Not unexpectedly, Mikey has been reviled by the radical fundamentalist Christian far-right, which has called him “Satan”, “Satan’s lawyer”, “the Antichrist”, “That Godless, Secular Leftist”, “Antagonizer of All Christians”, “Most Dangerous Man in America” and “Field General of the Godless Armies of Satan.”
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We Need More ‘Muckrakers and Fewer Buck-Takers
There was a time when journalism didn’t just report the news—it changed the country. It broke monopolies, exposed corruption, and forced presidents to act. Today, with public trust in media at historic lows, that kind of reporting can feel like a relic. But what if the real story isn’t that it’s gone—but that we’ve stopped supporting it? Media scholar and activist Mickey Huff has just written a provocative call to action titled We Need More ‘Muckrakers and Fewer Buck-Takers. It’s a phrase rooted in the legacy of Carl Jensen, who believed journalism should serve the public—not profits—and who spent decades exposing the stories corporate media ignored.
At a moment when misinformation spreads faster than truth and corporate consolidation shapes what we see and don’t see, this conversation asks something deeper: What kind of media system does democracy require—and what role do we play in rebuilding it?
Guest – Mickey Huff is the director of Project Censored and president of the Media Freedom Foundation, where he has co-edited its annual Censored book series since 2009. In 2024, he joined Ithaca College as a Professor of Journalism and the Distinguished Director of the Park Center for Independent Media. Through these roles, he leads efforts in critical media literacy, independent journalism, and the production of the weekly syndicated Project Censored Show. Park Center For Independent Media
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Economics, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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An Economic State Of The Union: Professor Richard Wolff
President Donald Trump did not deliver the traditional State Of The Union address to the American people and Congress last week. Instead, for nearly two hours, he hosted what amounted to a MAGA campaign rally. Trump’s approval rating is under 40% and sinking. The two uppermost concerns of the American people are their increasing economic difficulties and their opposition to ICE and its reign of terror in major American cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He put both forward as huge successes.
Trump has secured a budget of billions of dollars to fund ICE, which has more money going forward than is in the combined budgets of all the state and local police departments in the United States. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security is either building, or leasing, space for huge detention centers across the country. Trump has issued National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7 (NSPM7) which targets critical thinkers. NSPM7 was then supplemented by a list of laws by Attorney General Pam Bondi, which she indicates will be used against these disobedient critical thinkers and activists.
Guest – Richard Wolff is Professor Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts, and the author of Understanding Capitalism. According to New York Times, Richard Wolff is, probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their national syndicated show Economic Update. Professor Wolff has authorized numerous books on capitalism and socialism, including most recently “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself“, “Understanding Socialism“; and “Understanding Marxism”, which can be found at democracyatwork.info.
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US-Israeli Attacks Against Iran, IEEPA Tariffs And Cuban Fuel Blockades
More than 1,000 Iranians — primarily civilians, including 180 students at a girls’ elementary school in Minab — have been killed in the U.S.-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, that was launched February 28 by President Donald Trump and his accomplice, accused war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This aggression has destabilized the region and triggered Iran’s legitimate exercise of self-defense.
Trump claimed he attacked Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. But U.S. intelligence has found that Iran is not acquiring nuclear weapons. Before the February 28 U.S.-Israeli attack, the country of Oman had been brokering negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S. and Israel insisted that Iran stop enriching uranium, limit its ballistic missile program, and end support for its “proxies” Hezbollah and the Houthis.
On February 27, Oman’s foreign minister said on CBS News that the negotiations had made significant progress, and a nuclear agreement was “within our reach.” Nevertheless, Trump maintained that diplomacy had been exhausted. The U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran the next day.
One month before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, Trump issued an executive order aimed at tightening the U.S. noose around Cuba’s neck. Trump’s January 29 order preposterously declared Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat,” without providing a shred of evidence. He warned that he would impose punitive tariffs on states that deliver fuel to Cuba. Trump’s intention is to suffocate the Cuban people, who rely on oil for 80 percent of their electricity.
On February 20, however, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s massive tariffs because they exceeded authority delegated by Congress under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The IEEPA authorizes the president to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats. Later that day, in response to the court’s decision, Trump issued an executive order ending IEEPA-based tariffs, including those that would penalize countries that ship oil to Cuba. That order stops the collection of all IEEPA tariffs, including those threatened in his January 29 Cuba emergency order.
Trump’s attempt to tighten the fuel blockade of Cuba came on the heels of the U.S. oil blockade of Venezuela, which had supplied more than 50 percent of Cuba’s oil. Countries that provided Cuba with oil, particularly Mexico, halted their shipments after January 29. Oil shipments to Cuba have virtually stopped. The lack of electricity has led to widespread blackouts, impacting hospitals and essential services. Cuba’s oil reserves could be totally depleted by March.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn, a former host on Law and Disorder is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law, and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory board of Veterans For Peace, she is a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and serves as the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She writes a regular column for Truthout, including two recent ones about Cuba and Iran.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, genocide, Human Rights, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance
Civil liberties attorney Cindy Cohn is widely recognized as one of the leading voices on digital freedom in the United States. As she prepares to step down as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, she leaves behind a 25-year legacy at the forefront of the fight for online rights. Over the years, she has helped shape some of the most important debates around encryption, government surveillance, and freedom on the internet.
Cohn first rose to national prominence in the 1990s as lead counsel for the EFF and PhD student Daniel Bernstein in Bernstein v. Department of Justice. That was the landmark case establishing that computer code is protected speech under the First Amendment. During the height of the so-called “crypto wars,” that decision helped free encryption from government control and shaped the security of the modern internet.
As legal director, and then as executive director, at EFF, Cindy has led major legal challenges to NSA mass surveillance. She as defended independent security researchers, fought government overreach justified in the name of national security, and pushed back against expanding corporate data collection. A central voice at the intersection of law and technology she has shaped debates over encryption, privacy, online speech, and civil liberties in the digital age. Her new book, Privacy’s Defender, published by MIT Press, reflects on those battles and what comes next.
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Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right
By all that is right and just, we will be rid of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States on January 20, 2029. But we will not be rid of the tremendous damage he is causing to our country. And we will not be rid of the cruel, populist, racist, White Christian, patriarchal, and nationalist MAGA New Right ideology that now dominates the Republican Party. Even after Trump decamps to Mar-a-Largo, MAGA will continue to pose an existential threat to our constitutional democracy.
We need to fully understand that there is an extensive, well-financed ideological structure made up of think tanks, publications, university institutes, and PhDs, that provide an intellectual patina to this dangerous movement. Unless the pro-democracy resistance exposes and dismantles the MAGA New Right, it will find replacements for Trump and will continue to wreck havoc, destroying the lives of people in the United States and around the world.
Guest – Laura K. Field is the author of the revealing new book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Field holds a PhD in government from the University of Texas at Austin, and has written for The New Republic, Politico, and The Bulwark. Field’s exposure of the ideological foundations of the MAGA New Right is based on copious research and her own experiences while she was embedded in that movement. She says she is grateful she “extracted” herself from that world as she saw how untethered the mostly privileged male purveyors of MAGA’s dangerous tenets are from the everyday struggles of real people. She realized how dedicated they are to eliminating the hard-fought advances our pluralistic society has won based on the values of equality, compassion, and justice.
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