Free Forum with Terrence McNally

I talk with ELIE MYSTAL, Justice Correspondent at The Nation magazine. We look through a legal lens at Trump’s fraud claims and his obstruction of an effective transition, at the question of what it will take for Biden to reverse Trump’s executive orders and rules, and finally we talk about the Supreme Court. You can learn more at thenation.com

More than 72 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. 72 million voted for his incompetence, racism, ignorance, cruelty, criminality, and for his disastrous handling of the pandemic. Here’s my 2018 conversation with MILTON BENNETT, an expert on culting behavior. He spells out the methods Trump uses – consciously or unconsciously - to turn his followers into a cult, impervious to contrary influence and united in defense of their aims and their leader.

It lookls as if Joe Biden will win a very tight electoral college victory against arguably the worst president in history in the midst of a deadly pandemic and crippled economy the incumbent has bungled disastrously. How could this election even be close? ROB JOHNSON, Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), and I talk about how we got here and what it’s going to take to move forward. As long as both parties depend on Wall Street and the 1% for funding, our real challenges - climate change, restoring the middle class, healthcare, systemic racism, etc.- will never truly be dealt with.

JON WIENER'S 2006 book, Conspiracy in the Streets: the Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Eight has been re-released to sync with release of the film, The Trial of the Chicago Seven. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, its ensemble includes Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman, Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, and Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman. Jon and I will talk about the film. We'll talk about the Trial. We'll talk about the attitudes and excesses of Mayor Daley and the Nixon administration and the parallels with 2020. With mass protests and brutal retaliation. A compromised justice department doing the President’s bidding. We will talk about this moment - how different and how similar is it to the 60s? What did we learn? What can we do better?

It’s a little over 3 weeks till the final day to turn in your ballot. Here’s my 2018 conversation with BILLY WIMSATT, founder and executive director of Movement Voter Project, one of the most effective election fundraising organizations I know of. In a clear break from the beltway strategy of big donors, big consultants, and big TV ad buys, MVP helps progressive donors move their money instead to the best local community-based organizations in battleground states. Money invested in the grassroots wins elections and makes change. Learn more at movement.vote

The US hold only one national popular vote – for President and Vice President – and The Republican party has won that national vote only once since 1988, that’s 32 years. Yet they've held the presidency 12 of those years. Under the two most recent popular vote losers / electoral college winners, we’ve suffered 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 recession, the monstrously failed response to the pandemic, and a devastated economy. I believe that minority rule sickens democracy. The electoral college is anti-democratic. I talk with ALEX KEYSAR about his new book, WHY DO WE STILL HAVE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE?

Even folks who live here, as I have since 1975, may have little idea of the central role Los Angeles played in the culture and politics of the 1960s. Too often LA is portrayed as surfing, Hollywood, and gogo dancing - think Gidget, Beach Boys, 77 Sunset Strip. Wiener and co-author, Mike Davis (City of Quartz) offer a “movement history” featuring early Black Power, the Watts uprising, the Chicano Moratorium, and LA’s star turn as a locus of the anti-war, gay lib, and women’s movements, as well as a driving force of much of 60’s counterculture. Wiener and I both arrived here for the first time in 1969 and this conversation is a lot of fun.https://jonwiener.com/

It’s now less than 50 days from what we usually call election day. This year we call it the day the polls close. On January 28th 2017 the week Trump took officee I recorded this conversation with Mark Hertsgaard of The Nation, Richard Eskow of The Zero Hour, and Drew Dellinger of Planetize the Movement. Here’s what I wrote then: "Friday Donald Trump was inaugurated with dark talk of American carnage, and Saturday over 600 marches in every state and 66 countries drew millions with a declaration of resistance. He's got both houses of Congress and soon the Supreme Court. We've got each other. Where do we go from here?"

We often think social contagion yields negative consequences - teens smoke because other teens smoke, for example. However, in his latest book, UNDER THE INFLUENCE: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, ROBERT FRANK makes the optimistic case that the economics of social contagion could solve our most critical problems — from climate change to income inequality – as well as the Covid-19 pandemic. There’s evidence: As VOX’s Ezra Klein points out, in the face of the coronavirus, "social pressure has driven perhaps the single fastest behavioral transformation in human history.”

In a normal year, children would to be starting back to school. This year, some will, some won’t, and parents, teachers, and school systems all face tough choices. What do know about what works to help kids whether they’re in school or not? Here’s my 2019 conversation with DAVID KIRP, Professor at UC Berkeley. His books include THE SANDBOX INVESTMENT and KIDS FIRST, and we talk about innovative programs that make a big difference in kids’ lives and deserve to be invested in and expanded nationally.