The Unfettered Speech Podcast

Neutral journalism is a comforting myth until you ask who it protects. We sit down with Omali Yeshitela, political activist, author, and longtime leader of the African People Socialist Party, to trace how Black journalism has functioned as a tool of liberation rather than a referee for “both sides.” From small community papers to global publications like Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, he argues that...

The fastest way to understand what our media system rewards is to watch which stories never get finished. Veteran journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell joins us to explain why animal rights reporting so often disappears unless activists “get naked or get arrested,” and why she believes that kind of coverage gap is not random. We dig into open rescue, including the beagle laboratory controversy, and what...

AI is starting to look less like a helpful tool and more like a new layer of governance: it can rank what you see, summarize what you’re “allowed” to know, and accelerate decisions that used to require human judgment. We sit down with investigative journalist Alan McLeod (MintPress News) to trace how Big Tech and the national security state are becoming hard to separate, from OpenAI politics to th...

War lies do not spread on their own. They move through incentives: access, career safety, secrecy laws, and a media culture that treats “official” as synonymous with “true.” We sit down with Chicago independent journalist Kevin Gosztola, editor of The Dissenter and author of *Guilty of Journalism*, to trace how whistleblowers and adversarial reporting collide with the modern national security stat...

You can feel when a society loses its ability to talk and starts reaching for labels instead. Unfettered Speech brings on Tucker Carlson for a frank conversation about how he went from the top of corporate news to independent media, and why the most punished questions are often the most important ones: What are we doing overseas, who benefits, and what is it doing to us at home? Leonard, Patrick,...

A ceasefire that gets violated every day isn’t a ceasefire, and that’s where our conversation starts. We’re joined by Wyatt Reed, an editor at The Grayzone, calling in from Beirut after spending about a week reporting inside Iran. He walks us through what he’s seeing in Lebanon right now: ongoing Israeli airstrikes, mass displacement, and a pattern of attacks that he says hits civilian infrastruct...

American politics isn’t just polarized, it’s profitable. We sit down with Melissa Witte (known online as Village Crazy Lady) to pull on the thread that connects forever wars, lobby power, and the strange reality that “safe” politicians still raise mountains of cash they don’t need to win. If you’ve ever wondered why Congress feels bought even when your representative runs unopposed, this conversat...

A single phrase can shut down scrutiny: national security. We sit down with Trevor Timm, co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, to unpack how the modern secrecy system works in practice and why it so often protects power instead of the public. From overclassification to the state secrets privilege, we dig into how courts and journalists can be boxed out, leaving...

The US dollar doesn’t just buy things, it buys time and power. We sit down with economist Richard Wolff to unpack the real mechanics behind reserve currency status and why it has allowed the United States to run massive national debt, import oceans of goods, and finance wars without asking households to pay the full price up front. Along the way, we get a clear history lesson on how reserve curren...

A court finds probable cause for felony animal cruelty, the public shows up to help, and the response is riot police, rubber bullets, and tear gas. That’s the reality surrounding Ridgeland Farms, a major beagle breeding and testing facility in Wisconsin, and it raises an unsettling question: what happens when cruelty is visible, documented, and even acknowledged in court, yet the animals still rem...

A ceasefire gets announced, markets breathe for a second, and then Lebanon is hit like the deal never existed. That’s where our conversation with investigative journalist Aaron Maté begins, because the details aren’t a sideshow, they’re the whole story. We walk through what was said publicly, what changed after U.S. and Israeli leaders spoke, and why the White House messaging around Lebanon, proxi...

You’re not “misinformed” you’re being managed. Daniel McAdams breaks down how color revolutions work, who funds them, and why the same playbook shows up at home. Listen now and tell us: what tipped you off first? War doesn’t just happen overseas, it gets built at home through incentives, institutions, and stories we’re pushed to repeat. I sit down with Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron...

Something feels off in the air again, the same slow-motion pressure that preceded lockdowns in 2020, except the trigger now is war, energy, and supply chains. We sit down with Mike Farris from the ‘Coffee and a Mike’ podcast and try to name what so many people sense but can’t quite pin down: the gap between political narratives and the hard limits of reality. We dig into why the Strait of Hormuz m...

The headlines rarely explain how displacement actually works, so we asked Ali Abunimah to spell it out. From Jordan, the Electronic Intifada founder walks us through what he reports on the ground in the West Bank: settler violence, military restrictions, and a paper trail of “state land” claims that can push families off farms and villages off hillsides with almost total impunity. We step back for...

A lot of people say they want “accountability,” but they don’t want the paperwork, the pushback, or the long, exhausting recovery years when the real deals get cut. We wanted to talk to someone who has done that work anyway, so we invited Karen Gabois, the founder of The Lens, a nonprofit investigative newsroom based in New Orleans. Karen walks us through her unlikely route into investigative jour...

A war without a map is a war that makes its own weather. We sat down with Trita Parsi to unpack how a cascade of bad assumptions, breathless narratives, and wishful thinking turned a coercive gambit into an open-ended conflict with Iran—one where objectives, talking points, and timelines keep shifting even as lives are on the line. Trita cuts through the fog: the difference between genuine Iranian...

A Swiss colonel sits down with us and lays out a chilling reality: one morning you can speak, the next you can’t bank. Jacques Baud, a former strategic intelligence analyst and UN mediator, explains how the EU sanctioned him for his public analysis of the Russia–Ukraine war—without charges, hearings, or a day in court. What follows is a clear-eyed look at how a foreign policy tool built for states...

Leverage only matters if you use it. We sit down with Jimmy Dore to revisit Force the Vote, the moment progressives could have withheld support for Nancy Pelosi to demand a Medicare for All floor vote during the peak of COVID. The goal wasn’t guaranteed passage—it was sunlight, debate, and a roll call that would finally separate healthcare advocates from healthcare branding. Instead, the moment pa...

Power doesn’t just move through parliaments and battlefields; it flows through boardrooms, data centers, and media brands. We dig into a glossy “master plan” for Gaza unveiled in the Davos orbit—an investment pitch that rebrands occupation as redevelopment, with coastal resorts and AI infrastructure on one side and a displaced, surveilled workforce on the other. Max Blumenthal joins us to unpack h...

What do we actually buy when we spend a trillion dollars on the Pentagon? Ben Freeman, director at the Quincy Institute and co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine, joins us to track the cash, the influence, and the narratives that keep America on a war footing while everyday security slips at home. We unpack the proposed $500 billion “plus up,” why it dwarfs any plausible threat environment,...

A prison visit changed everything. Gabe Shipton walked into Belmarsh as a filmmaker and left as a brother on a mission, determined to fight the dehumanization of Julian Assange and defend the future of journalism. What followed was a masterclass in narrative warfare, grassroots organizing, and the power of independent media to bend reality back toward truth. We explore how Ithaka  reframed a polar...

Year-end reflections tend to blur optimism and fatigue, and this conversation makes that line painfully clear. The promises attached to a noninterventionist reset—troop withdrawals, constitutional restraint, and a focus on domestic renewal—collide with a year marked by ad hoc tariffs, confused messaging on inflation, and fresh entanglements abroad. The guest frames a core contradiction: if leaders...

What if the rules of public health were rewritten by advertising money and platform levers rather than open debate? We sit down with Dr. Robert Malone to unpack how information control, corporate pressure, and crisis messaging collided with science across 2020–2022—and what that means for medical consent today. From the early push for repurposed therapeutics to the media and tech backlash that fol...

Power doesn’t persuade on its own—people do. Ambassador Chas Freeman joins us for a rare, unflinching look at how the United States drifted from negotiation to coercion, swapped empathy for slogans, and ended up trapped in conflicts with no off-ramps. We dig into the mechanics of real diplomacy, the difference between a ceasefire and a peace, and why ignoring your opponent’s interests is a fast wa...

He told the truth about CIA torture—and went to prison. Hear John Kiriakou explain why “official channels” failed, how secrecy is weaponized, and what blowback really looks like. Listen/Watch now and tell us: should the CIA even exist? If the guardrails are the problem, where do you turn for the truth? We sit down with former CIA officer and author John Kiriakou to unpack the hard facts behind the...