WhoWhatWhy's Podcasts

The recent charges of "anti-Semitism" leveled against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) have reignited the debate about the power and influence of AIPAC and the Israel lobby. In this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, we talk with Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the Uni...

By scouring the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report and some declassified CIA documents, reporter Jeff Kaye has confirmed that there were two separate rendition, detention and interrogation programs run by separate branches of the agency's Counterterrorism Center. The first, which we refer to as "Program A" in this podcast, is already known. Consultants James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen w...

This week, the House Judiciary Committee held its first hearing in over eight years on any kind of gun legislation. In that intervening period, names like Newtown, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Parkland have been seared into our collective consciousness. However, the hearings this week focused only on HR 8 , a piece of legislation that would institute universal background checks. We lear...

No matter how unseasonably cold or hot it gets or how powerful the storms are, there will be those who still don't accept the urgency of climate change. For the rest of us, who believe we humans are destroying life as know it on earth, the group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has a message: We must change our behavior now, or die. In this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, Rory Varrato, a US spokesperson for t...

A penetrating look into the transformative influence of black feminist political strategy and principles in mainstream US politics, especially since the 2016 election.

Sixty prominent Americans have signed a letter calling on Congress to reopen the investigations into the 1960s assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The letter, signed by historians, journalists, lawyers, and other experts on the four political murders, is an effort to create a national truth and reconciliation commission to...

Everyday we look at unfolding news and events through the lens of politics. Suppose we tried to understand it all instead through the lens of psychology? Suppose we got beyond the zero-sum political construct, and into how we have been and are still being manipulated. What if we realized that President Donald Trump is just a symptom of the deeper crumbling psychological infrastructure of our count...

President Donald Trump will probably never build one foot of his wall. Still, today there are 650 miles of border wall already dividing the US and Mexico. It's almost one-third of the entire border. It divides cities, families, private property, and even impacts wildlife and habitats. We journey to the border in this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, as Jeff Schechtman is joined by Ronald Rael, associate...

The recent UN report on climate change indicated that we could be facing existential risks — ever more extreme weather events and rising sea levels — within 20 years. So what is the world to do? Jeff Goodell, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone , joins Jeff Schechtman for this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast. Goodell, the author of The Water Will Come : Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking o...

Two weeks ago Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made a splash when tweeting about what she thought to be $21 trillion in misappropriated Pentagon money that she claimed was enough to pay for Medicare for all. She based her conclusions on misreading a complex article in the Nation , " The Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed ," by investigative journalist Dave Lindorff. It'...

President Ronald Reagan introduced a range of myths about America's social safety net, led by his images of "welfare queens" and the implication that most recipients of public aid were African American. President Bill Clinton pledged to "end welfare as we know it," and over the objections of many progressives, he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996. Our guests in th...

While President Donald Trump has used truculence, bluster, populism, and manufactured division to hide the true nature of his agenda, George Herbert Walker Bush used manners, civility, and grace to hide the truth of his and his family's agenda. Both are very similar in their objectives. Both have enabled the continued transfer of wealth to the upper echelons of society. Both have sought to protect...

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has made lots of money peddling slanted news as "fair and balanced" on his Fox News Channel. The man who built it, Roger Ailes, retired in disgrace in 2016 and died a year later. He changed American media in many ways, and used fear as a driving force at Fox — and earlier in campaigns for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Divide and Conquer: The Story o...

With the news cycle of late nearly engulfed by the questions — and spy games — swirling around "Russiagate," taking a fresh look at Watergate could be an especially worthwhile endeavor. Luckily, revisiting the rise and fall of President Richard Nixon is exactly what Shane O'Sullivan does for us in his new book, Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate and the CIA . O'Sullivan — Jeff Schechtman's guest in th...

An author argues that, love it or hate it, capitalism is making planetary crises worse.

Fifty-five years ago President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. The widely accepted narrative for all these many decades is that he was murdered by lone-wolf gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that there was at least one other shooter present in Dealey Plaza. Skeptical? There's really only one piece of evidence you need to see in order t...

California forests have long been a disaster waiting to happen. Forest density, antiquated forest practices, stressed and dead trees as a result of bug infestation, conflicts between state and federal government, and private property owners wanting to live close to the "wildland-urban interface" are just a few of the problems. In this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, we talk with longtime California env...

Every election cycle brings with it one state that comes to represent the zeitgeist of that election. We all remember Florida during the 2000 election. In years past, as Nixon used to say, it was all about Ohio. In 2016, Pennsylvania was the tipping point. This midterm, all eyes were on the Peachtree state, as Georgia came to define not only Democratic energy but the issues of election integrity a...

As a regular reader of WhoWhyWhy , you know that we have focused like a laser on election integrity and uncovered story after story about voter suppression in Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and elsewhere. But important as all of this is, it's only part of the bigger story.   It was Joseph Stalin who said that " it's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes....

This week feels like the culmination of two years of attacks on journalism — including President Donald Trump's ongoing denunciations of the press as "the enemy of the people," the bombs sent to CNN along with other targets of Trump's verbal venom, and more revelations about the horrifying murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi, who feared for his life in the months leading...

While the congressional midterm elections and some statewide races dominate mainstream media coverage, there's a lot of action at the local, grassroots level. As minority communities grow and the dominance of the white majority wanes, immigrants and first generation Americans are running for office — and winning. Sayu Bhojwani served as Commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs in Ne...

WhoWhatWhy continues to expose voter suppression across the country. With reporters on the ground in Georgia and Florida, and ongoing reports from North Carolina, North Dakota, and other places, readers are getting to witness first hand the impact on minority voters of rejection of absentee ballots , the extremes of "exact match," the consolidation of polling places , photo ID laws , poor voting m...

It's always scary to hear a Wall Streeter utter the hackneyed phrase, "this time it's different." And yet today it really is. Especially the economic conditions that make up the operating system for today's world. As markets ride a roller coaster this week, as the political environment is heavily focused on international trade and tariffs on manufactured objects like cars and jeans, the reality is...

When we talk about fracking, thoughts usually turn to the environment. But that's only a small part of the story. Fracking is changing the geopolitics of the world. It's creating the illusion of moving America towards energy independence. This is impacting Saudi Arabia and Russia; influencing politics in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania; and, counterintuitively, it may be making the US a loser nation...

Is California ready for a "Bear Flag" party? Former Congressman Tom Campbell wants Californians to have more choice in statewide elections, and is pushing a plan to create a third party for the state. In this conversation with Peter B. Collins, who has known Campbell for more than 25 years, the former lawmaker talks about the need for a new party and the benefits it would offer to voters and candi...