Civil Rights

Happy Monday! Sam is back from vacation! He and Emma speak with Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones, to discuss his recent book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. First, Sam and Emma run through updates on Israel...
Happy Monday! Sam and Emma speak with Dylan Penningroth, professor of Law and History at the University of California, Berkeley, to discuss his recent book Before The Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. First, Sam and Emma run through updates on Iran’s military-specific retaliatio...
Happy Monday! Sam is BACK from vacation. He and Emma speak with Richard Kahlenberg, education & housing policy consultant and non-resident fellow at Georgetown University, to discuss his recent book Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See. First, Sam an...
Happy Juneteenth! Sam and Emma speak to Imani Perry, professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, to discuss the history and legacy of Juneteenth, as well as the importance of its bec...
Sam and Emma host Gary Orfield, professor and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, to discuss his recent book The Walls around Opportunity: The Failure of Colorblind Policy for Higher Education. First, Emma and Sam run through updates on the US sho...
Sam and Emma host Adam Hochschild, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism, to discuss his recent book American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. First, Sam and Emma run through this weekend’s updates on the Georgia runoff,...
Sam and Emma host Aaron Kleinman, director of research for the States Project at Future Now to discuss how Roe V. Wade being overturned is affecting fights for state legislatures around the country. Then, they are joined by Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President at the Quincy Institute, to discuss...
Sam and Emma host Kellie Carter Jackson, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, to discuss her recent book Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, using the influence of Black leaders to explore the growth of the abolitionist movement from moral...
Sam and Emma host Keisha Blain, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, to discuss her recent book Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, on how Hamer’s long life led up to a final decade and a half of incredibly influential activism. Professor Bl...
The MR Crew are off for Rosh Hashanah today (happy New Year for all who celebrate!), but Sam doesn’t leave you hanging-he sits down with Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California, Berkeley Law School, to discuss his recent book Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Po...
Sam and Emma host Yale professor of history Elizabeth Hinton to discuss her new book America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s and the importance of recasting what were once considered “riots” as rebellion, and how the original framing of those eve...
Sam and Emma host Columbia Law professor Jamal Greene to discuss his new book “How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart.” They delve into the absolutist, legalized view of rights that frames discourse in the US, how it diverges from the Framers original commun...
Sam and Emma host University of Detroit Mercy professor Alex Zamalin to discuss his latest book Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility on the need for disruptive organized pressure to combat racism and its thread through American history.
Sam hosts Adam Jentleson (@AJentleson), former advisor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to discuss his new book Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy on how the filibuster negatively impacts American democracy.
Sam hosts author, radio host, and Spy Magazine founder Kurt Andersen to discuss his latest book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History and how the last 50 years have turned the clock back on economic equality and progress in America.
On today’s Majority Report, UChicago Law Professor and former SCOTUS clerk, Justin Driver joins the program to talk about his new book The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. In the book, Driver gives an engaging and alarming book that aims...
Trump copies Bush in Afghanistan and South Asia and why his new Afghan strategy will lead to more civilian killings.
Tanya Erzen, n associate professor of religion and gender studies at the University of Puget Sound, joins us to discuss her new book: “God in Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison Ministries in the Age of Mass Incarceration”, explains what brought her to work inside the prison system and the ...
Jeff Sessions was to racist for Reagan’s America.
Adam Green, articulates just how horrible the political situation is now. Why progressives have an advantage now inside the Democratic Party. What we can learn from Republican strategy. Why we need Keith Ellison as head of the DNC. How progressives should handle Donald Trump. Rolling back the ACA...
A major breakthrough for fighting global warming and ozone depleting pollutants in Kigali. China creates a new market for greener products. The left fights a carbon tax in Washington State. Newt Gingrich loses it on Megyn Kelly. Elizabeth Warren rips Richard Burr. Michael Savage says Beyonce is a...
Paul Heideman, a PHD candidate in sociology at NYC explains the opportunity that the left saw to takeover the Democratic Party in the 1960s. Pushing the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party. When the Democrats were a southern regional party. Capital intensive industries and coming to terms with...
Will Melania Trump’s nude pictures might finally hurt Trump with core Republican voters.
Libertarian Billionaire Peter Thiel funds lawsuits against Gawker and threatens the free press and a Bloomberg libertarian columnist writes a dumb column about it. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson gets booed at the Libertarian Convention for talking with a bit of rationality on carbon emissions...
University of Wisconsin Professor Harvey J Kaye author of  Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great, explains how FDR’s Four Freedoms speech came about and how he connected the advances of the New Deal with America’s intervention in World War II. What are...
Journalist Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America and Sam take a deep dive into the history and full policy implications of the Voting Rights Act. Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the rebranding of discrimination. Where in the Constitution voting r...
The Nation’s Ari Berman, explains the historical importance of Selma Alabama. Why Martin Luther King Jr. selected Selma as a site for the Civil Rights struggle. Find out the unknown Civil Rights heroes of Selma. The slow pace of change in Selma and why the cities Country Club is still racially se...
Princeton’s Eddie Glaude Jr. explains the larger meaning of the crisis in Ferguson and the murder of Michael Brown, “conflict porn” and why we don’t get to the bottom of race in America, why white supremacy is the disease that undermines America, white supremacy can be practiced by anyone, the po...
Professor Walter Block proposed that laissez faire free market exchanges are the best way to organize society, how Block thinks the United States limits freedom, debating the minimum wage, full time workers who live in poverty, debating minimum wages and job losses, what is the value of wages if ...
The Nation’s Ari Berman explains why the Republicans backing down on their latest extortion efforts is not a big victory for Democrats, why Republicans only cater to the far right extreme, the southern domination of the modern Republican Party, why modern conservative politics is all about fighti...
Salon contributing writer, Rebecca Traister explained Texas’s draconian new reproductive laws, Wendy Davis’s unexpected and amazing filibuster and how galvanizing will this moment be?
The Nation’s Ari Berman, reported from the Supreme Court on the fate of the Voting Rights Act, explained what Justice Roberts doesn’t like about the Voting Rights Act, the conservative “Wall Street approach” to voter suppression, why overwhelming political support for the Voting Rights Act is bei...
Nan Aron, President of the Alliance for Justice explained why the next Supreme Court term matters so much, the future of affirmative action and the voting rights act and Justice Robert’s troubling history of hostility to civil rights. How the Supreme Courts decisions on CitizensUnited and the Aff...