6 of the Best Podcasts About Radical American Movements
Reading Time: 3 minutesShows exploring the past, for this particular moment in history.
From the Weather Underground movement of the 1960s to the Capitol attacks of January 6, 2021, the stories of radicals and radicalist movements are often violent, mysterious, and packed with fascinating characters.
As the United States enters a new era of even more divisive politics, looking to the past can help us find a way forward. Here are 6 recent podcasts that take us through the history of radical groups, searching for answers in their unearthing of obscured history. Most are told in the voices of the people closest to the events being documented.
Mother Country Radicals tells the story of The Weather Underground, a radical left-wing militant organization activated in 1969 and named a domestic terrorist group by the FBI for bombing campaigns targeting government buildings and banks.
Host Zayd Ayers Dohrn is the son of Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, and offers both unique insight into how the WU members organized and a personal account of what it was like to be born ‘underground’ in the ‘70s, when his parents were on the run from the FBI. It’s a tale of scrappy young people who fought for change at any cost, and via interviews with Bernardine and Bill, an inside account of all the terrible mistakes the group made along the way
Transfeminine author and activist Margaret Killjoy is the voice behind Cool Zone Media’s new show Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, which focuses on freedom fighters, trailblazers, and the wild rebels behind our most iconic revolts. It’s a history show, but Margaret keeps things casual and fun, like a fast-paced, action-packed conversation between your smart, politically aware friends that you get to eavesdrop on.
Margaret brings along guests (the first is Behind the Bastards‘ Robert Evans) to take them (and us) through complex stories of resistance that will have you punching the air and feeling slightly less lazy in your efforts to stand against oppression and fight for change. A timely recommendation: the two-part story of the Jane Collective, an underground organization that provided illegal abortion services in Chicago from 1969 until abortions became a protected constitutional right in 1973.
American Radical takes us back to the 2021 Capitol attack, following the path of Roseanne Boyland, who died at the Capitol in the middle of a crowd trying to force its way past a police line. We start in Roseanne’s hometown of Kennesaw, Georgia, a place Roseanne, who hated politics, rarely left. MSNBC journalist Ayman Mohyeldin, an old high school friend of Roseanne’s brother-in-law, traces the last six months of Roseanne’s life and her path toward radicalization, taking in clues from conspiracy theory YouTube videos, reports from medical examiners, and conversations with the people who loved Roseanne, all in an effort to figure out exactly how and why she died on January 6.
Will Be Wild is another show about the radicalization that pulled people from their homes across America and brought them into the Capitol on January 6. By speaking with a range of people, from those who tried to stop the attack to people who participated in it, and even a son who turned in his own father for his crimes, hosts Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz (of Trump, Inc.) focus on what the insurrection meant for American democracy, and paint a picture of January 6 as just the beginning of a new anti-democratic movement in the U.S.
In the early 1990s in Davis, California, Oscar Gomez was everywhere: You could hear him on ‘La Onda Chicana,’ his UC Davis radio show on KDVS; leading protests against the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival; and participating in a hunger strike to create a UCLA Chicano studies department at UCLA; and speaking out against Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative that restricted undocumented immigrants from using public schools and hospitals. In 1994, he was found dead in Santa Barbara at age 21. Imperfect Paradise’s series The Forgotten Revolutionary allows host Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, who was also a college student, radio host, and active participant in the Chicano movement at the time, to share his search for answers and his own reflections on being someone who came out of the same movement alive.
Eric Benson is the host of Project Unabom, which seeks to tell the story of Ted Kaczynski and what actually happened during the 18 years he was terrorizing the nation from his tiny cabin in the Montana woods. New original reporting and interviews give us a look into the dicey joint decision of the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish a terrorist’s manifesto, explore the killer’s childhood, and provide troubling insight into how his spiraling conspiratorial thinking might have begun. Included also is the little-known story of the Dungeon & Dragons players who were initially and incorrectly identified as the culprits, and exclusive interviews with Kaczynski’s brother David.