Free Forum with Terrence McNally

This week we replay an interview recorded March 25 2017 in the early days of Trump with JONATHAN SMUCKER. Currently a grassroots organizer in his hometown of Lancaster PA, Jonathan was involved with Occupy Wall Street and has a lot to say about what worked and what we can learn from what didn't. I turn to him now because the grassroots will go a long way to determining turnout in November, and turnout will decide the mid-term election.

Michael Pollan's How To Change Your Mind, once as high as #4 on the NYTimes best-seller list, currently #4 in LA, tells the story of the scientific research as well as his personal experience of guided sessions with psychedelics. Award-winning LA Weekly columnist, Seven McDonald, does the same in an article for Playboy on the therapeutic use of MDMA (ecstasy) to treat PTSD. I'm joined by McDonald and Cole Marta MD, the principal investigator at the Los Angeles site of FDA-sanctioned phase II and III trials with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.

Late summer 2004, I recorded conversations with Thomas Frank on What's the Matter With Kansas? and with George Lakoff on Don't Think of an Elephant. We were deep in two wars and three months from the Bush-Kerry election. Both Frank and Lakoff point to blind spots about the way we see the world, how we frame what we experience, and how powerful both can be. What do they have to tell us today three months from the 2018 midterms?

Want to spend less time online and more time in the real world? Brain science has learned a lot about habits. That has given corporations new power with which to manipulate us, but it also gives us greater power over our own behavior. Listen to my 2012 conversation with CHARLES DUHIGG about his book THE POWER OF HABIT, in which he tells us what a habit is, how they form, how they can be broken, and how we can put what science has learned about habits into practice.

Under John Roberts, Supreme Court decisions are consistently pro-business, recently based on corporate rights of free speech and freedom of religion. How did we get here? Will it only get worse with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh? Listen to my conversation with ADAM WINKLER, constitutional law professor at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America and his latest, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights.

With the retirement of Justice Kennedy and the looming fight to hold back the confirmation of a replacement until after the mid-terms - which would increase voter turnout on both sides - let’s listen to my 2013 conversation with MARCIA COYLE re her book THE ROBERTS COURT: The Struggle for the Constitution. Coyle confirms my belief that the most crucial issue in considering the last few GOP-nominated justices is not abortion or gun control - but the rights and powers of corporations vs those of human beings.

As alarming as the news may be, we must not only oppose and alter the bad news, but we must also envision a possible future for the US that people deserve - as well as a path to get there. That is the mission of historian, political economist, activist, and writer, GAR ALPEROVITZ, co-chair of the Next System Project at the Democracy Collaborative, and someone who’s thinking seriously about what replaces corporate capitalism. You can learn more at garalperovitz.com

Midterm elections take place November 7th – less than 20 weeks from the day we record this interview. Our democracy is under threat and the validity, accuracy, and reliability of our voting and vote-counting is as well. I talk about those threats and what we can do about them with BRAD FRIEDMAN, an independent investigative blogger, journalist, and muckraker who’s broken numerous stories over the past 15 years. You can learn more at BradBlog.com

On a national level and in many states, the GOP know that if politics and elections are played fair and square, they lose. So they turn to gerrymandering, voter suppression, the refusal to act on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, etc. I talk with DAVID FARIS about the ideas in his new book, IT’S TIME TO FIGHT DIRTY: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics.

Consider this a two-part episode. This week, my 2011 conversation with JACOB HACKER & PAUL PIERSON, authors of WINNER-TAKE-ALL POLITICS: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Next week, a NEW one w/ NANCY MacLEAN on her book DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS, which reveals the GOP’s strategy of Citizens United, gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc. to retain power no matter how unpopular their destructive policies.