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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U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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War And Debt Economy
We are experiencing a great transformation in who holds economic, and therefore political power in America. This transformation is going on for the last 50 some years. There are now approximately 1000 billionaires in America. Our constitutional form of government, the government of checks and balances has been transformed. The three branches of government, the legislative, the judicial, and the executive were designed to hold each other in check and that is no longer the case. Executive power reigns supreme.
Trump is not the disease, he’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is capitalism, production for profit, and not for human needs. This is manifested in autocracy, the rule of the rich, and those with whom they are connected. They have popularly become known as the Epstein class. In tandem with the billionaire class in power in the United States, is this country’s decline in power as compared to China. China is soon to become the leading economic force in the world.
It is about to overcome the United States in this regard, while American governmental debt approaches $40 trillion, an amount worth more than the annual production of goods and services in the United States, this country has now turned to borrowing money from China to aid its economy.
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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Israel’s Practice of Assassination
World War II ended in 1945. Sixty million people had died. To prevent a recurrence the foundations of international law were laid. The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals concluded in 1947. The guilty verdicts against the Nazi leaders were not seen as “victors’ justice“ but instead as a way forward based on three principles. The first was the illegality of aggressive war, the worst crime of all because it included within it all other crimes. The second principal consisted of violations of the laws of war, such as bombing civilians. The third was crimes against humanity.
Pete Hegseth, the American Secretary of Defense, who has changed the name of the department and styles himself as Secretary of War, has denounced the very laws of war set up after Nuremberg. The third principal, crimes against humanity, includes assassinations which are political murders. The Israeli assassination program has become elaborate and ambitious. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, the ethno- state has been an extremely aggressive violator of these three principles.
In developing political assassination as “an art form” in the words of an Israel leader, Israel has taken the lead along with its partner the United States in the dismantling of the international rules of law.
Guest – Washington DC journalist Andrew Cockburn is the author of many books and articles. His most recent book is titled Washington is Burning: Lies and Corruption in the Age of Trump. His Substack is titled Spoils of War. Mr. Cockburn’s latest article appeared on April 17, 2026 in the London Review of Books.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Iran, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Donald Trump vs History
The article is titled, Donald Trump vs History: The Trump School of Falsification and it is not about Trump’s personal difficulties with telling the truth. The first paragraph of the article reads: “The rise to power of Donald Trump and his minions has sanctified and energized a campaign to revive the kind of triumphalist, exceptionalist version of U.S. history that reigned over both academic and public culture from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.”
The article goes on to say that “To drive that campaign forward, the Trump regime has now launched simultaneous assaults against schools, libraries, museums, the National Park Service, and even the National Archives.” In short, it is nothing less than the wholesale effort by Trump and company to dishonestly rewrite America’s history.
Guest – Bruce Levine is a retired history professor who has taught history at the University of Illinois and the University of California. He has written four books on the Civil War, including The Fall of the House of Dixie. His most recently published book is a biography of Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican leader of the Civil War era and Reconstruction era. He’s now writing a study of democratic revolutions and Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
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U.S. Aids Israel’s Brutal Geopolitical Positioning
We are living in a time of great peril to humanity. Two nuclear-armed countries, the United States of America and Israel, commenced a war of aggression against Iran, on February 28th. This war threatens to spread uncontrollably. It has already quickly become a regional war. A full world war could be triggered, creating the danger that the United States or Israel might use their atomic weapons. The radioactive fallout would bring about a nuclear winter.
The current war of illegal aggression reminds us that on September 1, 1939, Hitler sent his troops east to invade Poland. Six years later, the resulting world war ended with the United States using atomic weapons, for the first time, on Japan. Sixty million people died in World War II.
Israel seeks to make Iran into a failed state to achieve what it has always wanted, to become the region’s hegemon and only nuclear power. Getting the United States involved in a war against Iran has been the project of Benjamin Netanyahu for 30 years. American presidents and the military have long resisted this. But not Trump.
There are already 50,000 American soldiers in the region. 3000 Marines are headed towards Iran. The 101st airborne division has deployed paratroopers, just as they did in the illegal invasion of Iraq 23 years ago. At that time, President George Bush falsely claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The lie this time is that Iran will soon develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles and the capability to deliver them.
Guest – Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, and the former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times. Among his more than a dozen books are American Fascism: The Christian Right and the War on America; The Greatest Evil Is War; and A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine. Chris Hedges is also one of the contributors to the book titled From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, a book composed of summaries of interviews with guests here on the Law and Disorder radio show, and available for purchase at O/R Books.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Economics, Gaza, genocide, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Gaza Genocide Relief Effort Launch
The war in Iran and Lebanon has pushed the war in Gaza off the front pages of our newspapers and from the screens of our televisions. But that war is still very real to the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank. Despite the so-called “cease-fire,” Palestinians continued to be killed by Israeli forces. They continue to starve for lack of food and water. They continue to die for want of medical care. They continue to lack sufficient schools for their children to attend, or houses in which to live. And they continue to wonder what the future holds for them and if they will ever again be able to live a decent life in what is left of their homeland.
Meanwhile, supporters of the Palestinian cause continue to do what they can to bring aid and comfort to the people of Gaza. One of those people is our guest today.
Guest – Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves. She retired from the Army as a Colonel. Ann Wright has also served America as a diplomat for 16 years, having served in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Somalia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, among other counties of this world. She resigned from the U.S. government in March of 2003, in opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq. Since her resignation, she has been active in many peace and justice groups including Veterans for Peace, Women for Peace and Code Pink. Currently, she is a coordinator for the Gaza flotillas and has twice been imprisoned in Israel for participating in those relief flotillas.
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Countering With A General Strike
We the people face a certain immediate future of increasing hardship and increasing authoritarian repression. Many of us are hoping to vote Trump and his MAGA gang out of office seven months from now in the 2026 congressional elections. But will the elections take place? And if so, under what restrictions? The Voting Rights Act that protected Black people has been gutted. MAGA’s Safe Act makes it difficult for women to vote who have taken their husband’s last name and now need to provide passports to show their identity. A lot of people in this country don’t have a passport. Mail in voting is sought to be prohibited.
It is naïve to think that the detention camps being built from one end of the country to the other are only for undocumented immigrants. As September 29 of last year, Trump signed National Security Memorandum Number 7 which listed crimes of political opposition that he wanted a prosecuted. Then his then Attorney General Pam Bondi made another list of the possible laws that can be used for the prosecution. The criminal prosecution of political opponents who hold progressive ideas has yet to be carried out.
ICE’s budget is larger than the combined budgets of all the police departments and sheriffs’ departments in the country. ICE has started purchasing long rifles, not just pistols. What for? The people who are recruited by ICE are signed up in places like gun shows and offered $50,000 signing bonuses.
Economically things have gone south in a hurry. Because of the American/Israel aggressive war against Iran oil prices have shot up increasing costs like filling up your tank or putting it on the food on the table. We are in a recession and looking at a depression. Trump wants the military budget increased from $1 trillion to one and a half trillion dollars. He tells us that a government has no money for medical care, food, subsidies, education, firefighting or hurricane relief.
Guest – Kshama Sawant is a socialist economist who was elected to, and served 10 years on the Seattle, Washington City Council. Her election and her advancement of a strong progressive agenda on the Council was often national news. She contributed to the recently published Law and Disorder book From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style writing the last chapter on what is to be done.
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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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