Rising Up with Sonali

What if everyone had a guaranteed basic income that covered their cost of living, without conditions, without means testing, without question?

Senators questioned RFK Jr.'s mass firings at the HHS, his cuts to critical services including COVID-19 vaccine access, and his unscientific claims about public health. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducted the largest ever workplace raid in the US on September 4th, at an EV battery plant in Georgia.

This week on Rising Up For Justice, Jane Kim from Working Families Party joins us. Jane is the California Director of the Working Families Party.

From the push-back against affirmative action and diversity initiatives, to the attacks on campus free speech, politicians seem hell-bent on attacking colleges for precisely the reasons that make them centers of learning.

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, housing remains the biggest challenge to New Orleans, a city that is one of the nation's most treasured centers of culture and history.

Chicagoans are determined to resist Trump's militarism, in particular Black-led abolitionist groups who have long fought against the over-policing of their communities. 

Ahead of Labor Day 2025, we'll turn to Shaun Richman, a former labor organizer turned academic and author who teaches labor history at SUNY Empire State University.

Detention Watch Network has compiled data to create a map of new and existing detention centers around the United States, hoping to shine a light on the vast architecture of incarceration. 

In Washington D.C. and around the country, people are fighting back enthusiastically, organizing spirited protests against Trump's expanding policing and militarization.

This week on Rising Up For Justice, Jane Kim from Working Families Party joins us. Jane is the California Director of the Working Families Party.

At the Netroots Nation conference in early August, well-known Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour spoke about the state of protest against Israel's on-going genocide in Gaza. 

Home Depot representatives say they are not cooperating with ICE but organizers are calling for a boycott of the corporate hardware chain. 

After a weeks-long standoff, during which Texas Democrats left to break quorum, their Republican colleagues threatened them with arrest.

Mamdani has inspired so much new energy, particularly among young people, all over the country, that it is shocking how many of his party colleagues still refuse to endorse him.

At the Netroots Nation 2025 conference in New Orleans, I had the chance to speak with SEIU-California President David Huerta, who had just been cleared for interviews for the first time since his arrest.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sued the Trump administration dozens of times, almost at the rate of once a week. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar at Netroots Nation 2025 in New Orleans.

Rehabilitation, we are told, is the goal of prisons and that imprisoning people who are convicted of crimes, will help them and help society. But does this work?

President Donald Trump weighed in on the controversial ads by American Eagle featuring the young white actor Sydney Sweeney and its not-so-subtle nod to eugenics.

There's a new easy-to-use online tool called Don't Inflate Our Plates allowing people to calculate inflation in their own state.

Jagpreet Singh is the Political Director for DRUM Beats and in an in-depth interview, he examines how and why South Asian voters in New York City mobilized for Mamdani and what lessons the election holds for the rest of the nation.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Israeli occupation forces intercepted the Handala and abducted and assaulted well-known labor activist Christian Smalls, the founder of the Amazon Labor Union.

Lopez is a screenwriter and playwright, film producer and performer, born in Mexico and undocumented for more than a dozen years before receiving amnesty.

Hear from Luana Lopez, the daughter of Ana Franco Galdamez, snatched by ICE agents on June 19, and from Fredid Toledo, an activist with Homies Unidos who is supporting Ana Franco's family.

It has been more than six months since Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad was overthrown, ending a bloody civil war and his family's 54-year rule over the Arab nation.

A new anthology of strategies aims to help progressive, people-centered narratives take hold–stories that can reshape our world to recenter collective care and equity.

The Los Angeles-area city of Huntington Park just passed a strict sanctuary city ordinance in response to the violent invasion of federal immigration agents.

Dance, like other art forms, is deeply therapeutic, and some would say, powerful. But can dance tear down prison walls?

Is it time to revive the practice of nonviolent direct action in the face of rising fascism?

More than a 100 people have been killed, including dozens of children in catastrophic flooding in central Texas on the fourth of July.

There are movements all over the nation for reparations for Black people and a dynamic push by Indigenous groups for returning land to their nations. What if these movements and their stories were linked? 

Neighborhoods are organizing people in rapid responses to the appearance of ICE agents. 

There are independent candidates like Zohran Mamdani who have come before him, and others who are coming after him.

We live at a time when the walls between us, digital, physical, geographic, racial, and cultural, seem larger and more impenetrable than ever.

In Spring 2025, a coalition of organizers in St. Louis, Missouri launched a campaign with international scope, targeting corporations implicated in the Gaza genocide.

Thousands of scholars in the US and beyond have signed on to a petition calling for an end to the war on Iran.

The Democratic Party offered itself up as an alternative to Trump near the end of his first term, but the time is ripe for a complete reconfiguration of the liberal party–if not a replacement. 

How can we reset Juneteeth within the context of authoritarian white supremacy? 

While reports from DC suggest Trump's spectacle was a bust, an estimated 6-12 million people marched against his policies in more than 2000 cities nationwide.

On Sunday June 8, hundreds of protesters mobilized outside the AC Hotel in Pasadena, upon hearing reports that ICE agents were hotel guests.

Tens of thousands of people have been gathering in downtown Los Angeles since June 5, when ICE agents began carrying out immigration raids.

Through personal experience with navigating the system to care for her mother, Judy Karofsky explores how elder care is broken and how to fix it.

A new project called the Philadelphia Safer Journalism Project aims to change harmful crime coverage.

A dozen anti-genocide international activists are on board a ship called the Madleen, sailing to Gaza to break Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid.

A new book makes the compelling case that most social media feeds are now filled with content that's been created using the same marketing tactics as cults do.

A new book makes the compelling case that most social media feeds are now filled with content that's been created using the same marketing tactics as cults do. This is an EXTENDED CUT of the interview.

In early May 2025, dozens of students and activists protested UW's ties to Boeing, a company whose weapons Israel is using to it its genocide of Palestinians.

Wisconsin's immigrant rights movement is strong and is standing up to the Trump regime's attacks creatively and persistently.

The Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution raising the minimum wage for tourism workers to $30 an hour, the highest minimum in the nation. 

Five years after the police murder of George Floyd, where is the movement for racial justice?