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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder August 4, 2025
The Dual State: A Contribution to Theory of Dictatorship.
The German Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel escaped from fascist Germany and settled in the United States. In 1941 he wrote an extremely important book which we’re going to discuss today. The book is titled The Dual State: A Contribution to Theory of Dictatorship.
The book explains how Hitler availed himself of two systems of law. The first Fraenkel called the normative state. This is your traditional law that regulates things like contracts and property. It was practiced in Nazi Germany and kept things stable. The second Fraenkel called the prerogative state. These are the arbitrary violence and unlawful actions taken by Hitler and the Nazis. These two systems of law existed side-by-side in Germany. This is what we see developing now in the United States of America.
Guest – Bill Mullen is professor emeritus of American studies at Purdue University and the co-founder of The Campus Anti-fascist Network. He’s also co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition and We Charge Genocide: American Ashes and the Rule of Law. He’s a contributor to the just published Law And Disorder book From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style.
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There are so many horrendous consequences from Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza: the tens of thousands of lost lives, with who knows how many thousands still buried under the rubble of war, the intentional starvation of the Palestinian people, the vast destruction of their schools and hospitals and homes and places of business. And then there is the targeting of journalists in Gaza trying to report the news of the war. To date, more of them have already been killed by the Israeli military than were killed in the Civil War, First and Second World wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the war on Afghanistan combined!
So today we cover the story of Israel’s attempt to keep complete and accurate news coverage of the war from the rest of the world, and the costly results of its attempt to do so: the hundreds of lost lives of those brave journalists who are determined to report news of the war no matter what the personal risks and costs may be.
There is now a documentary film that tells the story of what is at stake for the journalists covering the news of the war in Gaza. It is called Gaza: Journalists Under Fire.
Guest – Director and producer Robert Greenwald is the founder of Brave New Films, a nonprofit social justice media organization, and the director of numerous long and short form documentaries including Uncovered: The War on Iraq, Unmanned: Americas Drone Wars, Rethink Afghanistan, and more.
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Law and Disorder July 28, 2025
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AI Generated Police Reports
Police departments across the U.S. are beginning to use artificial intelligence tools like Axon’s “Draft One” to automate the writing of police reports based on body-worn camera audio. While the goal is to save time and reduce paperwork, digital rights advocates are raising serious concerns. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that Draft One lacks transparency, making it hard to tell whether errors or biases in reports come from the AI or the officer. They argue this could compromise accountability and justice. The ACLU has also flagged risks tied to AI’s potential for inaccuracy and bias.
Some agencies are moving forward with these tools, but others—like the King County prosecutor’s office in Washington—are banning them outright. As this technology spreads, it’s prompting critical questions: Should AI be trusted to shape official police narratives? And what safeguards are in place to protect the public?
Guest – Beryl Lipton is a Senior Investigative Researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation specializing in government transparency and surveillance technology. She leads large-scale public records campaigns and contributes to projects like the Atlas of Surveillance, a searchable database and map that documents the use of surveillance technologies by law enforcement agencies across the United States. Before joining EFF, Beryl worked at MuckRock focusing on prison privatization and public-private partnerships. She serves on the board of Spare Change News and contributes to Gannett New York, where she has helped expose police misconduct records across the state.
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Documentary: The Last Class
We’re pleased to be joined by Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse, the Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action. She is the producer of the new documentary, The Last Class, a personal portrait of Robert Reich as he reflects on a period of immense transformation, personally and globally. Reich is of course the well-known political economist, professor, and author, who has worked for four presidents, including as Secretary of Labor for Bill Clinton. He is also the co-founder of Inequality Media Civic Action.
For 40 years, Reich has taught more than 40,000 students and has now retired. Drawing on his lifetime in politics, he has used his class, Wealth and Poverty to offer a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society and democracy itself.
Guest – Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse is the Executive Director of both Inequality Media and Inequality Media Civic Action, nonprofits founded by Robert Reich to make compelling digital content about inequality and threats to American democracy. She serves as Robert Reich’s co-host on the weekly Coffee Klatch podcast, and she produced The Last Class film as part of her new endeavor, CoffeeKlatch Productions.
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Law and Disorder July 21, 2025
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Stephen Rohde: Checks, Balances And Separation Of Powers
This half-hour, we continue our ongoing effort to understand in real time, the upheavals taking place within our US government, as well as the blitz of attacks on the rule of law – and that includes attacks on judges, lawyers, academics, students, and virtually anyone else who is critical of the Trump Administration’s policies and actions.
Today, we’ll be particularly focused on recent Supreme Court decisions that have paved the way for Trump to dismantle the Department of Education and numerous government agencies. The decisions also Limit the public’s ability to challenge government overreach and have led to swift deportations to countries in which detainees have no prior connection. We’ll also follow-up on the critically important case on First Amendment and academic freedom, American Association of University Professors v, Rubio, which is in trial right now in Boston.
Guest – Stephen Rohde is a legal scholar, writer, lecturer and political activist, who practiced civil rights and civil liberties law for over 50 years. He’s past chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and past national chair of Bend the Arc, a Jewish Partnership for Justice. He’s also a co-founder and chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, and a Special Advisor on Free Speech and the First Amendment for the Muslim Public Affairs Council. He hosts the podcast, Speaking Freely.
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The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime
As V.I. Lenin observed, “There are times in history when nothing happens for decades and other times when decades happen within days” He should know. He was the leader of the Russian revolution which overthrew the feudal Tsar and changed the history of the 20th century. We are living in a time when history is unfolding very rapidly. Trump and his coterie of the upper 1/10 of 1 percent aligned with the mostly lower middle class MAGA movement have taken huge steps upending and overturning the kind of democracy, however, limited by race and class, that we have lived with since gaining independence from England 250 years ago.
We are experiencing the transition to a new absolutist executive. Trump and the ideologues who have shaped his MAGA movement is a president who acts on the premise that whatever he does is lawful. He claimed full power to close down departments like the Department of Education, impound congressionally authorized spending, deport people without due process, while ignoring the courts. This is what he calls “a unitary executive.”
The classic definition of fascism is that it is one of the political forms that capitalism may assume in its monopoly imperial phase. It has a material foundation in a tenuous alliance between sectors of the extremely rich monopoly capitalists and a mobilized lower middle class. The key to fascist rule is the privatization of large parts of the government on behalf of the monopoly class. This ideology now in ensconced in the White House.
The right wing is opposed to environmental governance, they don’t believe in climate change. They are against open borders, universal healthcare and green energy. Those who advocate for these beneficial movements are called “cultural Marxists.” They refer in a derogatory way to all contemporary progressive political causes. They call it woke. They use the term as it means to belittle all social justice struggles against racism and inequality, Its most common usage is as a racist dog whistle.
These fascists want to secure their rule by getting control of the entire cultural apparatus of society, a process that the Nazis, the German fascists of their time,called “bringing it into line.” The current attack on universities is the most recent example.
Guest – John Bellamy Foster is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is a prominent scholar on ecology and the author of many books, including Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce. Professor Foster is the editor of the venerable socialist magazine “Monthly Review“ and the author of the article The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime in its recent May 2025 issue.
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