Rising Up with Sonali

In Southern California, where this program is based, numerous local NO KINGS gatherings took place.

This week on Rising Up For Justice, Chaumtoli Huq, founder and editor of Law@theMargins joins us.

On October 18th, in an event that will be televised on Free Speech TV, a second so-called “No Kings” mobilization promises to be even more wide ranging than the first. 

After two long and horrific years, a relentless Israeli bombing campaign centered on a genocidal project of erasing Palestinians in Gaza, has been put on hold.

This week on Rising Up For Justice, Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent  joins us.

In a new book, Art of Defiance: Protest Graphics and Poetry for Palestine, editor S. A. Bachman brings together verse in English and Arabic from the likes of Susan Abulhawa, Refaat Alareer, and Saul Williams.

In a powerful new book, historian Ilan Pappe imagines a more hopeful future for Palestine, one that he hopes will come about via 8 “mini revolutions” in Israel.

In a new book by young Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad, we learn what it was like to see Gaza through her eyes.

This week on Rising Up For Justice, Yliana Johansen-Méndez, Chief Program Officer of Immigrant Defenders Law Center  joins us.

Jonathan Rosenblum is the author of a new book about Kshama Sawant's leadership in Seattle, called We're Coming for You and Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics.

The Debt Collective has organized a rent debt strike against Equity Residential, the fifth largest landlord in the nation and the largest in the city of Los Angeles.

California's incarcerated firefighters may win a huge pay bump if Gov. Gavin Newsom signs AB 247, a bill that's just reached his desk.

This week on Rising Up For Justice, Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent  joins us.

As a self-described “daughter of a deportee, raised by a single mom in and around Northeast LA,” Angela Gonzales-Torres is running for Congress on an abolitionist platform of people-first housing, guaranteed basic income, Medicare-for-all, Green New Deal, immigrant justice and more. 

The state of New Mexico just adopted a universal free childcare program, becoming the first state in the nation to do so. 

Jimmy Kimmel has become a cause celebre after being yanked off the air by his employer Disney. But the ensuing mass protests against Kimmel's firing were less about who he is as an individual than what his firing indicated. 

This week on Rising Up For Justice, Dr. Van Bailey, an award-winning educator and advocate for transgender youth joins us.

Code Pink activists showed up at a restaurant in Washington DC to confront President Donald Trump with chants of “Free DC, Free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time.”

A series of climate justice actions around the world this month, seeks to “Draw the Line” on numerous interconnected issues plaguing people and the planet.

Tariq Khan, a historian and lecturer at Yale University, found out first hand what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Charlie Kirk's work.

This week on Rising Up For Justice, Nadia Marin Molina, Co-Executive Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network joins us.

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.