Podcasts about ACT UP

We close out Pride Month with one of our favorite queer films from the past decade, 2017's BPM. From French director Robin Campillo, BPM follow a group of ACT UP activists during the height of the AIDS epidemic. With Campillo's emotional and intuitive style of observation, the film shows the labors of political organization in all the warts … Continue reading "348 – BPM"

We interrupt this podcast feed for this special report... (morse code sounds, fly in wooshes, whatever you hear in your head other than this podcast)For 70mm Rejected's first film roundup special, we were able to get back recent voices and amazing possums Grace, Thomas, AND joining us, our Salò street correspondent and new voice to the feed, Pat. They sit down, discuss and present the 2025 Village Pride Mount Rushmore Special.Kick back and relax as they talk about films that should be on the queer film Mount Rushmore, who missed the cut, and who the village chiseled out of the rock as the village voted representative.Check out the full list of the films voted on and discussed in this episode, HEREAnd for a deeper dive into some Pride + Queer culture and histoy, touched upon in this episode, please check out these wonderfully curated links by Pat:Marsha P. Johnson and the Stonewall Rebellion (Crash Course Black History): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftcvaJCKVjsStonewall at 50 (Amnesty International): https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/06/stonewall-riots-50-year-anniversary/The conflict between Pride as a celebration and a protest, in the wake of current queer oppression, is as old as Pride itself (Welcome to New York, a brochure distributed by ACT UP at Stonewall 25 in 1994): https://actupny.org/documents/stonewallfly.htmlThis year's Queer Liberation March in New York City is on Sunday, June 29th: https://queermarch.org/Shout out to The Village and the hosts of 70MM for making a most excellent community. This podcast is made with love and appreciation.And, if you're not already a Villager, you can join 70MM's Patreon by clicking the link below.https://www.patreon.com/70mm

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comPaul is a writer, an editor, and an old friend. He's a regular contributor to The New Yorker and a senior fellow in Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. He's the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventing Bach, and his new book is The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s.For two clips of our convo — on Martin Scorsese's extraordinary religious films, and the strikingly resilient Catholicism of Andy Warhol — head to our YouTube page.Other topics: Paul raised in upstate NY as a child of Vatican II; his great-uncle was the bishop of Burlington who attended the 2nd Council; Thomas Merton and Flannery O'Connor as formative influences; working in publishing with McPhee and Wolfe; Cullen Murphy on the historical Christ; Jesus as tetchy; Czesław Miłosz; Leonard Cohen making it cool to be religious; the row over The Last Temptation of Christ and Scorsese's response with Silence; Bill Donahue the South Park caricature; Bono and U2; The Smiths; The Velvet Underground; Madonna and her Catholic upbringing; “Like A Prayer” and “Papa Don't Preach”; her campaign for condom use; when I accidentally met her at a party; Camille Paglia; Warhol the iconographer; his near-death experience that led to churchgoing; Robert Mapplethorpe; S&M culture in NYC; Andres Serrano's “Piss Christ”; Jesse Helms' crusade against the NEA; Sinead O'Connor's refusal to get an abortion; tearing up the JP II photo on SNL; the sex-abuse crisis; Cardinal O'Connor; the AIDS crisis; ACT-UP's antics at St. Patrick's Cathedral; the AIDS quilt as a cathedral; and Paul's gobsmacking omission of the Pet Shop Boys.Coming up: Edward Luce on the war with Iran, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Thomas Mallon on the AIDS crisis, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. (NS Lyons indefinitely postponed a pod appearance — and his own substack — because he just accepted an appointment at the State Department; and the Arthur Brooks pod is postponed because of calendar conflicts.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Here's your local news for Wednesday, June 25, 2025:We get the details on a bid to revitalize the western corner of Capitol Square,Hear the pros and cons of a proposed low-income housing development on Verona Road,Brave the heat to participate in a flax processing demonstration,Share lessons in solidarity from the Act Up movement,Broadcast the most comprehensive weather report on the airwaves,Travel back in time to 1966,And much more.

In a powerful interview, author Sarah Schulman reflects on decades of activism, from fighting AIDS to advocating for Palestinian liberation, revealing key lessons learned along the way.SAVE THE DATE July 16th 7pm EDT:  Laura hosts an online conversation just for our donors. It's a chance to connect, ask questions, and hear what's coming up behind the scenes. Make a one off donation or become a sustaining member by making it monthly go to LauraFlanders.org/donate. This show is made possible by you! Description: What is “solidarity” and what does it require? Giving up on perfection, for one thing, says Sarah Schulman, author of “Conflict is Not Abuse,” and so much more. Award-winning writer, teacher, playwright and activist, Schulman's latest book is “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity”, in which she reflects on years of experiments and learning, from the 1980s to today. In this episode, find out what role GRITtv, an earlier iteration of Flanders' show, played in the movement for Palestinian liberation, and hear a discussion of the Harlem artist Alice Neel. Schulman sits on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her non-fiction books include “Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair” and “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993”. Also in this episode, a commentary from Laura on the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, a strategic progressive who practiced solidarity.“When I confronted the Israeli occupation of Palestine, something resonated for me emotionally between that and the AIDS experience. What I felt was similar was that people who were endangered were being falsely depicted as dangerous.” - Sarah Schulman“Right now we're in the middle of a cataclysm of fascism and there's no quick fix. And we have to understand that the idea that you can go in and just fix it is a supremacy concept.” - Sarah SchulmanGuests:  Sarah Schulman, Writer & AIDS Historian; Author, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity This show is made possible by you! To become a sustaining member go to LauraFlanders.org/donate Watch the special report released on YouTube June 20th 5pm ET; PBS World Channel June 22nd, and on over 300 public stations across the country (check your listings, or search here via zipcode). Listen: Episode airing on community radio (check here to see if your station airs the show) & available as a podcast June 25th.Full Uncut Conversation Release: While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation.  Full Episode Notes are located HERE. RESOURCES-Related Laura Flanders Show Episodes:•  Organizing for Ceasefire Through Policy & Protest: Meet the People of JVP & NY Assemblymember Mamdani:  Watch, Listen:  Full Conversation,  Episode• Jacqueline Woodson & Catherine Gund: Breathing Through Chaos & the “Meanwhile”:  Watch, Listen:  Full Conversation,  Episode•  GRITtv: Sarah Schulman: Emerging Palestinian Queer Movement: Watch Related Articles and Resources:•  ‘They're Coming After All of Us.'  You Might as Well Tell the Truth. The longtime activist and writer Sarah Schulman on why now is the time to stand up to people you oppose. By Lydia Polgreen, Produced by Vishakha Darbha, April 10, 2025, The Opinion - New York Times•  The Vault:  ACT UP protesters tue up traffic in lower Manhattan in 1988, NY Eyewitness News ABC 7•  Jewish peace activists hold sit-in protest at Grand Central to demand ceasefire in Israel-Hamas conflict, October 27, 2023, PIX11 News-NY•  Alice Neel Documentary on the life and work of Alice Need (1900—1984), American portrait painter.  November 18, 2009, Official Trailer•  Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman Present, United In Anger, A History of ACT-UP, a film by Jim Hubbard. Learn More Laura Flanders and Friends Crew: Laura Flanders, along with Sabrina Artel, Jeremiah Cothren, Veronica Delgado, Janet Hernandez, Jeannie Hopper, Gina Kim, Sarah Miller, Nat Needham, David Neuman, and Rory O'Conner. FOLLOW Laura Flanders and FriendsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauraflandersandfriends/Blueky: https://bsky.app/profile/lfandfriends.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/LauraFlandersAndFriends/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lauraflandersandfriendsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFLRxVeYcB1H7DbuYZQG-lgLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lauraflandersandfriendsPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/lauraflandersandfriendsACCESSIBILITY - The broadcast edition of this episode is available with closed captioned by clicking here for our YouTube Channel

Examining Psalm 9 and 2 Samuel, Pastor Rebecca delivers a sermon on doing the right thing even when your actions seem fruitless.

As fascist threats escalate globally, activist and playwright Sarah Schulman argues that achieving real change requires embracing imperfection and rejecting "supremacy concepts" – listen as she explains what this means for social justice movements today.Description: What is “solidarity” and what does it require? Giving up on perfection, for one thing, says Sarah Schulman, author of “Conflict is Not Abuse,” and so much more. Award-winning writer, teacher, playwright and activist, Schulman's latest book is “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity”, in which she reflects on years of experiments and learning, from the 1980s to today. In this episode, find out what role GRITtv, an earlier iteration of Flanders' show, played in the movement for Palestinian liberation, and hear a discussion of the Harlem artist Alice Neel. Schulman sits on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her non-fiction books include “Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair” and “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993”. Also in this episode, a commentary from Laura on the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, a strategic progressive who practiced solidarity.“When I confronted the Israeli occupation of Palestine, something resonated for me emotionally between that and the AIDS experience. What I felt was similar was that people who were endangered were being falsely depicted as dangerous.” - Sarah Schulman“Right now we're in the middle of a cataclysm of fascism and there's no quick fix. And we have to understand that the idea that you can go in and just fix it is a supremacy concept.” - Sarah SchulmanGuests:  Sarah Schulman, Writer & AIDS Historian; Author, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity This show is made possible by you! To become a sustaining member go to LauraFlanders.org/donate Full Conversation Release: While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation. These audio exclusives are made possible thanks to our member supporters.Watch the special report released on YouTube June 20th 5pm ET; PBS World Channel June 22nd, and on over 300 public stations across the country (check your listings, or search here via zipcode). Listen: Episode airing on community radio (check here to see if your station airs the show) & available as a podcast June 25th. Full Episode Notes are located HERE. RESOURCES-Related Laura Flanders Show Episodes:•  Organizing for Ceasefire Through Policy & Protest: Meet the People of JVP & NY Assemblymember Mamdani:  Watch, Listen:  Full Conversation,  Episode• Jacqueline Woodson & Catherine Gund: Breathing Through Chaos & the “Meanwhile”:  Watch, Listen:  Full Conversation,  Episode•  GRITtv: Sarah Schulman: Emerging Palestinian Queer Movement: Watch Related Articles and Resources:•  ‘They're Coming After All of Us.'  You Might as Well Tell the Truth. The longtime activist and writer Sarah Schulman on why now is the time to stand up to people you oppose. By Lydia Polgreen, Produced by Vishakha Darbha, April 10, 2025, The Opinion - New York Times•  The Vault:  ACT UP protesters tue up traffic in lower Manhattan in 1988, NY Eyewitness News ABC 7•  Jewish peace activists hold sit-in protest at Grand Central to demand ceasefire in Israel-Hamas conflict, October 27, 2023, PIX11 News-NY•  Alice Neel Documentary on the life and work of Alice Need (1900—1984), American portrait painter.  November 18, 2009, Official Trailer•  Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman Present, United In Anger, A History of ACT-UP, a film by Jim Hubbard. Learn More Laura Flanders and Friends Crew: Laura Flanders, along with Sabrina Artel, Jeremiah Cothren, Veronica Delgado, Janet Hernandez, Jeannie Hopper, Gina Kim, Sarah Miller, Nat Needham, David Neuman, and Rory O'Conner. FOLLOW Laura Flanders and FriendsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauraflandersandfriends/Blueky: https://bsky.app/profile/lfandfriends.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/LauraFlandersAndFriends/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lauraflandersandfriendsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFLRxVeYcB1H7DbuYZQG-lgLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lauraflandersandfriendsPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/lauraflandersandfriendsACCESSIBILITY - The broadcast edition of this episode is available with closed captioned by clicking here for our YouTube Channel

The Master Builders CEO has told 2GB Afternoons the industry needs to clean its act up after the High Court ruled against the CFMEU.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, In the Key of Q welcomes Rita de Los Angeles, a country singer-songwriter whose journey has taken her from the streets of Los Angeles to rural Germany. With her unique blend of country, Americana, and indie folk rock, Rita has carved out a distinctive space for herself as a proudly queer artist in the international country music scene.Born to Arab immigrant parents who filled their home with country music, Rita's relationship with the genre has evolved through remarkable life experiences. At fifty-five, she's built a life in Germany with her wife of sixteen years, performs to sell-out shows, and has just released her Pride anthem, "Not Even a Little," dedicated to Dykes on Bikes.In this candid conversation, Rita shares stories of her early activism with Queer Nation and ACT UP, her forced migration due to unequal marriage laws, and how singing unexpectedly became her medicine during a period of debilitating panic attacks.Timestamps[00:00:00] - Introduction[00:02:00] - Rita's stage name and life in Los Angeles[00:04:11] - Being a native Los Angeleno and immigrant families[00:05:51] - Egyptian parents' migration to the US[00:08:24] - Discussion on attitudes toward international conflict[00:10:24] - Early activism with Queer Nation and ACT UP[00:13:10] - LGBTQ+ environment in 1980s-90s Los Angeles[00:15:29] - Shutting down anti-gay church services[00:19:02] - Who are the Dykes on Bikes?[00:20:40] - Country music influences and family connections[00:25:48] - Ageism in the gay community[00:28:12] - Creating inclusive spaces through music[00:30:48] - The transformative experience of seeing diverse couples slow dancing[00:35:04] - The story behind "Home Is Where the Heart Is"[00:40:03] - Separation from family during COVID[00:42:32] - Discovering singing as therapy for panic attacks[00:46:48] - The fifteen-year-old self segment[00:51:13] - Two minutes on living your dreams[00:54:24] - Gateway track: "Not Even a Little"Featured Songs"Slow Dancing" - A ballad inspired by seeing diverse couples slow dancing at one of Rita's performances in a rural German bar"Home Is Where the Heart Is" - A poignant reflection on being forced to leave the US due to unequal marriage laws"Not Even a Little" - Rita's Pride anthem dedicated to Dykes on Bikes, described as "country disco" with hip-hop rhythmsAbout Rita de Los AngelesRita de Los Angeles is a country singer-songwriter now based in rural Germany, just outside Cologne. Born and raised in Los Angeles to Egyptian immigrant parents, Rita spent her early adult years as an activist with Queer Nation and ACT UP before building a successful career in film and television marketing. After meeting her German wife 23 years ago, Rita was forced to leave the US due to immigration laws that didn't recognize same-sex relationships.At age 55, Rita has reinvented herself as a musician, discovering that singing helped cure her debilitating panic attacks. She now performs regularly in rural Germany, including in churches—places she once protested against. Rita donates her streaming royalties to Immigration Equality, an organization supporting LGBTQ+ immigrants.Key Quotes"I was just an angry bird. And I wanted to put myself on the street and stop traffic and shut down these church services." - On her early activism"My heart is always in two places. When I go home to California, I miss my kids, I miss my wife. And when I'm in Germany, I miss my dad, I miss my...

Reflecting on her days at summer camp, Pastor Rebecca's sermon this week describes the experience of being changed as a result of getting "swept up" in a movement.

In his sermon last week, Pastor Vince introduced our new worship theme of "Act Up" with a sermon describing the ways God calls us to resist creatively.

Join artist and photographer Lola Flash for a six-part series exploring New York City during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s.  Episode two reunites Flash with her longtime friend Aldo Hernandez. They discuss their involvement with ACT UP and two sites that helped shape their activism: the LGBT Center in Greenwich Village and Aldo's apartment near Tompkins Square Park.  Learn more about Lola Flash, her work, and the stories shared in this project at https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/1222

Every year, 1st December is World AIDS day. To mark the occasion, let's look back at the story of the Act Up group. Act Up started causing a buzz in New York in 1987, four years after the AIDS virus had been discovered. The highly organised group met several times a week to discuss their action plan. They demanded more prevention and communication campaigns from the state, better access to care, transparency from pharmaceutical labs and an end to the deportation of undocumented migrants. They used shock tactics to attract the attention of the media. When was this group formed? What kind of campaigns did they use? What are some examples of concessions secured by Act Up? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the latest episodes, click here: ⁠Why is 'permacrisis' the new dictionary word of the year?⁠ ⁠Is it dangerous if I get heart palpitations?⁠ ⁠Why do we get great ideas in the shower?⁠ A Bababam Originals podcast, written and produced by Joseph Chance. First broadcast: 7/12/2022 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Est-ce que les artistes parviennent à fédérer leurs publics ? Est-ce que les travailleur·ses de la culture prennent la mesure de la bascule, des risques qui se profilent et contre lesquels il sera presque impossible de lutter ? Et d'ailleurs comment on lutte ? Réponse dans l'heure du thé, la partie enquête de cet épisode 8 de Dramathis. Dramathis est un podcast écrit, incarné, monté et mis en musique par Mathis Grosos. Soutenez-le sur Patreon ! Les personnes qui interviennent dans l'épisode : Féris Barkat (extrait France Inter), Hervé Loichemol de Hungry for Justice in Palestine. Les manifestant·es du 10 avril à Paris : Claire-Serre Combe, secrétaire générale du Synptac CGT,Muriel Richard, attachée de presse, Une étudiante en L1 histoire de l'art, Un étudiant en licence de géographie, Une musicienne syndiquée au SNAM qui dépend de la CGT spectacle, Sébastien, auteur de BD, Marthe, illustratrice. L'équipe de Cultures en lutte IDF :Léo Tétaz-Josse, comédien, metteur en scène et étudiant, Hugo Jannet, auteur, interprète, batteur, Esther Abarca, comédienne, autrice, metteuse en scène, Samuel Marin Belfond, critique d'art, artiste-auteur, formateur en prévention VSS, Maeline, artiste plasticienneDes références pour aller plus loin : Les comptes instagram de @cht.am, @mariecoquillechambel, @graspolitique, @elisaamaranta, @camilleetienne_, @banlieues_climat, @aggressively transLes comptes de @grandebavardeuse, @sarahmako, @ryolaitdebrebis sur Tik Tok, La panique woke de Margot Mahoudeau, Contre le théâtre politique d'Olivier Neveux, Quand l'art chasse le populaire de Marjorie Glas, Programme de désordre absolu : décoloniser le musée de François Vergès, Act Up de Didier Lestrade, Répertoire des subversions de Martin Le Chevallier, Shoulder to shoulder : a queer history of solidarity, coalition and chaos de Jake Hall, Une pétition à relayer : Pétition pour protester contre la dissolution d'urgence palestineDes associations à soutenir : Utopia 56, Urgence Palestine, Le Collectif des Jeunes de Belleville, Nous Toutes, ExisTransInter... Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Est-ce que les artistes parviennent à fédérer leurs publics ? Est-ce que les travailleur·ses de la culture prennent la mesure de la bascule, des risques qui se profilent et contre lesquels il sera presque impossible de lutter ? Et d'ailleurs comment on lutte ? Réponse dans l'heure du thé, la partie enquête de cet épisode 8 de Dramathis.Dramathis est un podcast écrit, incarné, monté et mis en musique par Mathis Grosos. Soutenez-le sur Patreon !Les personnes qui interviennent dans l'épisode : Féris Barkat (extrait France Inter),Hervé Loichemol de Hungry for Justice in Palestine.Les manifestant·es du 10 avril à Paris : Claire-Serre Combe, secrétaire générale du Synptac CGT,Muriel Richard, attachée de presse,Une étudiante en L1 histoire de l'art,Un étudiant en licence de géographie,Une musicienne syndiquée au SNAM qui dépend de la CGT spectacle,Sébastien, auteur de BD,Marthe, illustratrice.L'équipe de Cultures en lutte IDF :Léo Tétaz-Josse, comédien, metteur en scène et étudiant,Hugo Jannet, auteur, interprète, batteur,Esther Abarca, comédienne, autrice, metteuse en scène,Samuel Marin Belfond, critique d'art, artiste-auteur, formateur en prévention VSS,Maeline, artiste plasticienneDes références pour aller plus loin : Les comptes instagram de @cht.am, @mariecoquillechambel, @graspolitique, @elisaamaranta, @camilleetienne_, @banlieues_climat, @aggressively transLes comptes de @grandebavardeuse, @sarahmako, @ryolaitdebrebis sur Tik Tok,La panique woke de Margot Mahoudeau,Contre le théâtre politique d'Olivier Neveux,Quand l'art chasse le populaire de Marjorie Glas,Programme de désordre absolu : décoloniser le musée de François Vergès,Act Up de Didier Lestrade,Répertoire des subversions de Martin Le Chevallier,Shoulder to shoulder : a queer history of solidarity, coalition and chaos de Jake Hall,Une pétition à relayer :Pétition pour protester contre la dissolution d'urgence palestineDes associations à soutenir : Utopia 56, Urgence Palestine, Le Collectif des Jeunes de Belleville, Nous Toutes, ExisTransInter... Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

[Cross-posted from my Substack here] If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you'll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right? The answer is all of them and none of them. This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say: Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement. Technological progress is what drives improvements [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 24th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kACcdhLDdWb9ZPG9L/why-you-can-justify-almost-anything-using-historical-social --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This episode's guest is actor, writer, voiceover artist, and unapologetic improv nerd, Roxana Ortega.Roxana is one of those rare artists whose vulnerability, honesty, and humor hit you all at once – and leave a lasting impression. If her voice sounds familiar, it might be because she's voiced everything from the passionate Frida Casagrande on The Casagrandes to characters in Call of Duty, Final Fantasy, and Monsters at Work. She's narrated Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, voiced countless animated characters, and is a master of voice matching (yes, she's dubbed for Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek).In our conversation, Roxana takes us through the unexpected path that led her to acting – from growing up in an academic household where creativity wasn't considered a “real” career, to having a life-changing epiphany while teaching English in Spain. We talk about the internal battle between playing it safe and going after what you truly want—and what it really means to decide to be an artist.We go deep into the power of improv as both a performance tool and a life philosophy, how failure can be a gift, and why community-building and representation matter now more than ever. Roxana shares how she uses her voice – literally and figuratively – to make space for underrepresented stories, and how she's continued to evolve as a writer, performer, and director.Whether you're someone who thrives on stage or someone working up the courage to take the leap, Roxana's journey will remind you that embracing risk, staying curious, and being fiercely yourself is always worth it.Episode Chapters 00:00 – Welcome + Introduction02:00 – Names, Language, and Laughter04:00 – Academic Roots & Artistic Restlessness07:55 – The Epiphany in Spain13:49 – “I Decided to Be an Actor”16:00 – Improv, Joy, and Redefining Failure21:45 – Performing, Directing, and Creating Her Own Work32:00 – Representation, Identity, and Making Space40:00 – The Tapestry of Humanity49:30 – Amazing Race Nerd Out50:50 – Blissful Spinster & Making Art on Your Own Terms54:35 – Final Words of Wisdom55:14 – What's Next for Roxana58:00 – Wrap-Up & Thank YouRoxana's Bio:Roxana Ortega is an American actor, writer, and voiceover artist who is known for voicing the ever-emotional Frida Casagrande on Nickelodeon's Emmy award-winning and Imagen award-winning cartoon The Casagrandes, a spinoff of the acclaimed series The Loud House.On-camera, she recently starred opposite Danny Trejo, Reno Wilson, and a cast of legends including Garrett Morris, Barry Bostwick, and James Hong in the Universal feature Grand-Daddy Day Care. Other film credits include The Flight Before Christmas opposite Mayim Bialik, Miss Congeniality 2 opposite Sandra Bullock, and Larry Crowne opposite Tom Hanks. Her TV guest-star credits include New Girl, Shonda Rhimes' For The People, The League, Rules of Engagement, NCIS, and the Peabody award-winning satire American Vandal.Behind the mic, she has voiced countless characters in TV, films, trailers, commercials, and some of the biggest video game franchises around, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Final Fantasy, Halo, and Ghost Recon: Wildlands. A two-time AudioFile Earphones Award winner, she has narrated the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina, and the New York Times's non-fiction best seller Random Family to name just a few. In addition, her mimicking skills have led her to voice-match the likes of Penelope Cruz, Salma Hayek, and Jennifer Tilly.Born in Los Angeles and raised in Fullerton, CA, Roxana is of mixed Peruvian and Mexican descent. She graduated from U.C. Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies, then spent a year teaching English in Madrid, Spain. It was there, while she was elaborately acting out English vocabulary to her students, that she realized she wanted to pursue a career in acting. She returned to the Bay Area and immersed herself in theatre and improvisation, then made her way to Los Angeles where she continued her improv and acting training and began writing and performing sketch comedy.Roxana is an alumna of the CBS Diversity Sketch Comedy Showcase, Upright Citizen's Brigade, and the Groundlings Sunday Company. She has written and produced her own shorts and performed storytelling all over Los Angeles, including at The Moth GrandSLAM.She is also the creator and co-host of the live storytelling show Minority Retorts, which spotlights stories from the under-represented, and The Risking Space, a podcast about art and risk. Connect with Roxana on: InstagramLearn more about Latina's Act Up on: InstagramCheck out The Groundlings on: Instagram Links & LoveIf your ears like what they're snacking on, follow, rate, and drop a review—it helps others find the show too.Want to support the show or get access to extra content—like behind-the-scenes journals, guest deep dives, and updates on getting Alone Girl made? Check out my Substack: The Blissful Spinster. Just $5/month supports this DIY labor of love and gets you a peek behind the scenes (when I find the time to write, lol). Find me and the pod on Instagram, Pinterest, and at blissfulspinster.com—where you can also find some pretty cool merch, if you're into that sort of thing. Thanks for being on this journey with me—and until next time, go find your happy.

Sarah Larson joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the Tesla Takedown movement, protesting Elon Musk and Donald Trump, along with the political efficacy of targeting an electric-car company and why some protesters are borrowing tactics from the AIDS activist group ACT UP. This week's reading: “Fighting Elon Musk, One Tesla Dealership at a Time,” by Sarah Larson “The Fired Student-Debt Relievers,” by E. Tammy Kim “What Marine Le Pen's Conviction Means for French Democracy,” by Isaac Chotiner “How Donald Trump Throttled Big Law,” by Ruth Marcus “Why Benjamin Netanyahu Is Going Back to War,” by Bernard Avishai To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I made a D&D resource for GMs that lets you insert one of 26 fun rappers into your dungeon scenario thingy: Download it free here.Drink of the Week (2:36)Take a whiff of this Jack Daniel's Sinatra Select and the surprising depth of character on the shelves at Frontier Geeks in Trinidad, Colorado.Game of the Week (7:31)Got down and dirty on a space station with Escape the Dark Sector (review on the blog, also). I also loved Scout, an engaging card-shedding game that keeps landing on the table. Hear about both.Track of the Week (13:14)”Act Up” by Ill Breed, from the D&D Project's assemblage of vaunted NY underground heavyweights.

Les français sont généreux ! France générosité rapporte qu'en 2022 les français ont donné plus de 5 milliards d'euros aux associations. Mais peut-être que, comme certaines personnes, vous êtes réticents à l'idée de donner aux associations. C'est normal de s'interroger sur la façon dont nos dons sont utilisés.  Dans le budget d'une association il y a une partie qui sert à récolter d'autres dons et une partie qui sert au bon fonctionnement de la structure. Les associations font en général preuve de transparence pour assurer la confiance de leur donateur.  Comment savoir si une association gère bien son budget ? Les associations sont-elles contrôlées ? Qu'est-ce que le label Don en Confiance ? Écoutez la suite de cet épisode de Maintenant vous savez ! Un podcast Bababam Originals, écrit et réalisé par Hugo de l'Estrac. À écouter ensuite : Comment l'association Act Up a-t-elle changé le regard sur le SIDA ? Comment soutenir des projets solidaires partout dans le monde depuis chez soi ? Aide à mourir, euthanasie... Quels sont les mots pour comprendre le débat sur la fin de vie ? Retrouvez tous les épisodes de "Maintenant vous savez". Suivez Bababam sur Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When kids act out - whether it's stealing, shutting down, pushing boundaries, or having emotional outbursts - how can we respond in ways that guide them toward growth rather than shame?Today, we explore two powerful real-life situations:A young10-year old boy who stole money from his mentor:  What was driving his behavior, and how could adults respond in a way that fosters learning instead of punishment?A seven-year-old struggling with his parents' divorce: How can his mother support his overwhelming emotions without taking on his distress or trying to “fix” his sadness?Through these stories, we unpack the difference between control and connection, how to set limits without losing warmth, and why holding space for kids' emotions is the key to their long-term resilience.Tune in as we explore - 2:24 Opening thoughts3:21 I'm dealing with a child who stole money and could use some help with a conversation.7:29 I don't like how I showed up and I want to bring something new to the conversation22:13 How can I help my son cope with his new home?Please share with your family and friends! Use PODCAST50 to get $50 off tuition for my Spring Deep Dive, The Art of Repair Work: From Regret to Resilience. Group starts on March 31st for 8 weeks, so register early to save your space. For ongoing practice and deeper learning, join my monthly membership program. You will find a safe space for live discussions and a supportive community of like-minded, open-hearted humans. Subscribe & Follow:Stay updated on new episodes and resources by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts or visiting yvetteerasmus.com.Thank you for listening! Here are more ways to connect with me: Become a member of my online learning community Join my Spring Deep Dive: The Art of Repair Work Join our calls live Set up a private session Follow me on TikTok @dr.yvetteerasmus

Dr. Gary Null provides a commentary on "Universal  Healthcare"       Universal Healthcare is the Solution to a Broken Medical System Gary Null, PhD Progressive Radio Network, March 3, 2025 For over 50 years, there has been no concerted or successful effort to bring down medical costs in the American healthcare system. Nor are the federal health agencies making disease prevention a priority. Regardless whether the political left or right sponsors proposals for reform, such measures are repeatedly defeated by both parties in Congress. As a result, the nation's healthcare system remains one of the most expensive and least efficient in the developed world. For the past 30 years, medical bills contributing to personal debt regularly rank among the top three causes of personal bankruptcy. This is a reality that reflects not only the financial strain on ordinary Americans but the systemic failure of the healthcare system itself. The urgent question is: If President Trump and his administration are truly seeking to reduce the nation's $36 trillion deficit, why is there no serious effort to reform the most bloated and corrupt sector of the economy? A key obstacle is the widespread misinformation campaign that falsely claims universal health care would cost an additional $2 trillion annually and further balloon the national debt. However, a more honest assessment reveals the opposite. If the US adopted a universal single-payer system, the nation could actually save up to $20 trillion over the next 10 years rather than add to the deficit. Even with the most ambitious efforts by people like Elon Musk to rein in federal spending or optimize government efficiency, the estimated savings would only amount to $500 billion. This is only a fraction of what could be achieved through comprehensive healthcare reform alone. Healthcare is the largest single expenditure of the federal budget. A careful examination of where the $5 trillion spent annually on healthcare actually goes reveals massive systemic fraud and inefficiency. Aside from emergency medicine, which accounts for only 10-12 percent of total healthcare expenditures, the bulk of this spending does not deliver better health outcomes nor reduce trends in physical and mental illness. Applying Ockham's Razor, the principle that the simplest solution is often the best, the obvious conclusion is that America's astronomical healthcare costs are the direct result of price gouging on an unimaginable scale. For example, in most small businesses, profit margins range between 1.6 and 2.5 percent, such as in grocery retail. Yet the pharmaceutical industrial complex routinely operates on markup rates as high as 150,000 percent for many prescription drugs. The chart below highlights the astronomical gap between the retail price of some top-selling patented pharmaceutical medications and their generic equivalents. Drug Condition Patent Price (per unit) Generic Price Estimated Manufacture Cost Markup Source Insulin (Humalog) Diabetes $300 $30 $3 10,000% Rand (2021) EpiPen Allergic reactions $600 $30 $10 6,000% BMJ (2022) Daraprim Toxoplasmosis $750/pill $2 $0.50 150,000% JAMA (2019) Harvoni Hepatitis C $94,500 (12 weeks) $30,000 $200 47,000% WHO Report (2018) Lipitor Cholesterol $150 $10 $0.50 29,900% Health Affairs (2020) Xarelto Blood Thinner $450 $25 $1.50 30,000% NEJM (2020) Abilify Schizophrenia $800 (30 tablets) $15 $2 39,900% AJMC (2019) Revlimid Cancer $16,000/mo $450 $150 10,500% Kaiser Health News (2021) Humira Arthritis $2,984/dose $400 $50 5,868% Rand (2021) Sovaldi Hepatitis C $1,000/pill $10 $2 49,900% JAMA (2021) Xolair Asthma $2,400/dose $300 $50 4,800% NEJM (2020) Gleevec Leukemia $10,000/mo $350 $200 4,900% Harvard Public Health Review (2020) OxyContin Pain Relief $600 (30 tablets) $15 $0.50 119,900% BMJ (2022) Remdesivir Covid-19 $3,120 (5 doses) N/A $10 31,100% The Lancet (2020) The corruption extends far beyond price gouging. Many pharmaceutical companies convince federal health agencies to fund their basic research and drug development with taxpayer dollars. Yet when these companies bring successful products to market, the profits are kept entirely by the corporations or shared with the agencies or groups of government scientists. On the other hand, the public, who funded the research, receives no financial return. This amounts to a systemic betrayal of the public trust on a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Another significant contributor to rising healthcare costs is the widespread practice of defensive medicine that is driven by the constant threat of litigation. Over the past 40 years, defensive medicine has become a cottage industry. Physicians order excessive diagnostic tests and unnecessary treatments simply to protect themselves from lawsuits. Study after study has shown that these over-performed procedures not only inflate costs but lead to iatrogenesis or medical injury and death caused by the medical  system and practices itself. The solution is simple: adopting no-fault healthcare coverage for everyone where patients receive care without needing to sue and thereby freeing doctors from the burden of excessive malpractice insurance. A single-payer universal healthcare system could fundamentally transform the entire industry by capping profits at every level — from drug manufacturers to hospitals to medical equipment suppliers. The Department of Health and Human Services would have the authority to set profit margins for medical procedures. This would ensure that healthcare is determined by outcomes, not profits. Additionally, the growing influence of private equity firms and vulture capitalists buying up hospitals and medical clinics across America must be reined in. These equity firms prioritize profit extraction over improving the quality of care. They often slash staff, raise prices, and dictate medical procedures based on what will yield the highest returns. Another vital reform would be to provide free medical education for doctors and nurses in exchange for five years of service under the universal system. Medical professionals would earn a realistic salary cap to prevent them from being lured into equity partnerships or charging exorbitant rates. The biggest single expense in the current system, however, is the private health insurance industry, which consumes 33 percent of the $5 trillion healthcare budget. Health insurance CEOs consistently rank among the highest-paid executives in the country. Their companies, who are nothing more than bean counters, decide what procedures and drugs will be covered, partially covered, or denied altogether. This entire industry is designed to place profits above patients' lives. If the US dismantled its existing insurance-based system and replaced it with a fully reformed national healthcare model, the country could save $2.7 trillion annually while simultaneously improving health outcomes. Over the course of 10 years, those savings would amount to $27 trillion. This could wipe out nearly the entire national debt in a short time. This solution has been available for decades but has been systematically blocked by corporate lobbying and bipartisan corruption in Washington. The path forward is clear but only if American citizens demand a system where healthcare is valued as a public service and not a commodity. The national healthcare crisis is not just a fiscal issue. It is a crucial moral failure of the highest order. With the right reforms, the nation could simultaneously restore its financial health and deliver the kind of healthcare system its citizens have long deserved. American Healthcare: Corrupt, Broken and Lethal Richard Gale and Gary Null Progressive Radio Network, March 3, 2025 For a nation that prides itself on being the world's wealthiest, most innovative and technologically advanced, the US' healthcare system is nothing less than a disaster and disgrace. Not only are Americans the least healthy among the most developed nations, but the US' health system ranks dead last among high-income countries. Despite rising costs and our unshakeable faith in American medical exceptionalism, average life expectancy in the US has remained lower than other OECD nations for many years and continues to decline. The United Nations recognizes healthcare as a human right. In 2018, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon denounced the American healthcare system as "politically and morally wrong." During the pandemic it is estimated that two to three years was lost on average life expectancy. On the other hand, before the Covid-19 pandemic, countries with universal healthcare coverage found their average life expectancy stable or slowly increasing. The fundamental problem in the U.S. is that politics have been far too beholden to the pharmaceutical, HMO and private insurance industries. Neither party has made any concerted effort to reign in the corruption of corporate campaign funding and do what is sensible, financially feasible and morally correct to improve Americans' quality of health and well-being.   The fact that our healthcare system is horribly broken is proof that moneyed interests have become so powerful to keep single-payer debate out of the media spotlight and censored. Poll after poll shows that the American public favors the expansion of public health coverage. Other incremental proposals, including Medicare and Medicaid buy-in plans, are also widely preferred to the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare mess we are currently stuck with.   It is not difficult to understand how the dismal state of American medicine is the result of a system that has been sold out to the free-market and the bottom line interests of drug makers and an inflated private insurance industry. How advanced and ethically sound can a healthcare system be if tens of millions of people have no access to medical care because it is financially out of their reach?  The figures speak for themselves. The U.S. is burdened with a $41 trillion Medicare liability. The number of uninsured has declined during the past several years but still lingers around 25 million. An additional 30-35 million are underinsured. There are currently 65 million Medicare enrollees and 89 million Medicaid recipients. This is an extremely unhealthy snapshot of the country's ability to provide affordable healthcare and it is certainly unsustainable. The system is a public economic failure, benefiting no one except the large and increasingly consolidated insurance and pharmaceutical firms at the top that supervise the racket.   Our political parties have wrestled with single-payer or universal healthcare for decades. Obama ran his first 2008 presidential campaign on a single-payer platform. Since 1985, his campaign health adviser, the late Dr. Quentin Young from the University of Illinois Medical School, was one of the nation's leading voices calling for universal health coverage.  During a private conversation with Dr. Young shortly before his passing in 2016, he conveyed his sense of betrayal at the hands of the Obama administration. Dr. Young was in his 80s when he joined the Obama campaign team to help lead the young Senator to victory on a promise that America would finally catch up with other nations. The doctor sounded defeated. He shared how he was manipulated, and that Obama held no sincere intention to make universal healthcare a part of his administration's agenda. During the closed-door negotiations, which spawned the weak and compromised Affordable Care Act, Dr. Young was neither consulted nor invited to participate. In fact, he told us that he never heard from Obama again after his White House victory.   Past efforts to even raise the issue have been viciously attacked. A huge army of private interests is determined to keep the public enslaved to private insurers and high medical costs. The failure of our healthcare is in no small measure due to it being a fully for-profit operation. Last year, private health insurance accounted for 65 percent of coverage. Consider that there are over 900 private insurance companies in the US. National Health Expenditures (NHE) grew to $4.5 trillion in 2022, which was 17.3 percent of GDP. Older corporate rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans argue that a single-payer or socialized medical program is unaffordable. However, not only is single-payer affordable, it will end bankruptcies due to unpayable medical debt. In addition, universal healthcare, structured on a preventative model, will reduce disease rates at the outset.    Corporate Democrats argue that Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a positive step inching the country towards complete public coverage. However, aside from providing coverage to the poorest of Americans, Obamacare turned into another financial anchor around the necks of millions more. According to the health policy research group KFF, the average annual health insurance premium for single coverage is $8,400 and almost $24,000 for a family. In addition, patient out-of-pocket costs continue to increase, a 6.6% increase to $471 billion in 2022. Rather than healthcare spending falling, it has exploded, and the Trump and Biden administrations made matters worse.    Clearly, a universal healthcare program will require flipping the script on the entire private insurance industry, which employed over half a million people last year.  Obviously, the most volatile debate concerning a national universal healthcare system concerns cost. Although there is already a socialized healthcare system in place -- every federal legislator, bureaucrat, government employee and veteran benefits from it -- fiscal Republican conservatives and groups such as the Koch Brothers network are single-mindedly dedicated to preventing the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid. A Koch-funded Mercatus analysis made the outrageous claim that a single-payer system would increase federal health spending by $32 trillion in ten years. However, analyses and reviews by the Congressional Budget Office in the early 1990s concluded that such a system would only increase spending at the start; enormous savings would quickly offset it as the years pass. In one analysis, "the savings in administrative costs [10 percent of health spending] would be more than enough to offset the expense of universal coverage."    Defenders of those advocating for funding a National Health Program argue this can primarily be accomplished by raising taxes to levels comparable to other developed nations. This was a platform Senator Bernie Sanders and some of the younger progressive Democrats in the House campaigned on. The strategy was to tax the highest multimillion-dollar earners 60-70 percent. Despite the outrage of its critics, including old rank-and-file multi-millionaire Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, this is still far less than in the past. During the Korean War, the top tax rate was 91 percent; it declined to 70 percent in the late 1960s. Throughout most of the 1970s, those in the lowest income bracket were taxed at 14 percent. We are not advocating for this strategy because it ignores where the funding is going, and the corruption in the system that is contributing to exorbitant waste.    But Democratic supporters of the ACA who oppose a universal healthcare plan ignore the additional taxes Obama levied to pay for the program. These included surtaxes on investment income, Medicare taxes from those earning over $200,000, taxes on tanning services, an excise tax on medical equipment, and a 40 percent tax on health coverage for costs over the designated cap that applied to flexible savings and health savings accounts. The entire ACA was reckless, sloppy and unnecessarily complicated from the start.    The fact that Obamacare further strengthened the distinctions between two parallel systems -- federal and private -- with entirely different economic structures created a labyrinth of red tape, rules, and wasteful bureaucracy. Since the ACA went into effect, over 150 new boards, agencies and programs have had to be established to monitor its 2,700 pages of gibberish. A federal single-payer system would easily eliminate this bureaucracy and waste.    A medical New Deal to establish universal healthcare coverage is a decisive step in the correct direction. But we must look at the crisis holistically and in a systematic way. Simply shuffling private insurance into a federal Medicare-for-all or buy-in program, funded by taxing the wealthiest of citizens, would only temporarily reduce costs. It will neither curtail nor slash escalating disease rates e. Any effective healthcare reform must also tackle the underlying reasons for Americans' poor state of health. We cannot shy away from examining the social illnesses infecting our entire free-market capitalist culture and its addiction to deregulation. A viable healthcare model would have to structurally transform how the medical economy operates. Finally, a successful medical New Deal must honestly evaluate the best and most reliable scientific evidence in order to effectively redirect public health spending.    For example, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Obama healthcare adviser, observed that AIDS-HIV measures consume the most public health spending, even though the disease "ranked 75th on the list of diseases by personal health expenditures." On the other hand, according to the American Medical Association, a large percentage of the nation's $3.4 trillion healthcare spending goes towards treating preventable diseases, notably diabetes, common forms of heart disease, and back and neck pain conditions. In 2016, these three conditions were the most costly and accounted for approximately $277 billion in spending. Last year, the CDC announced the autism rate is now 1 in 36 children compared to 1 in 44 two years ago. A retracted study by Mark Blaxill, an autism activist at the Holland Center and a friend of the authors, estimates that ASD costs will reach $589 billion annually by 2030. There are no signs that this alarming trend will reverse and decline; and yet, our entire federal health system has failed to conscientiously investigate the underlying causes of this epidemic. All explanations that might interfere with the pharmaceutical industry's unchecked growth, such as over-vaccination, are ignored and viciously discredited without any sound scientific evidence. Therefore, a proper medical New Deal will require a systemic overhaul and reform of our federal health agencies, especially the HHS, CDC and FDA. Only the Robert Kennedy Jr presidential campaign is even addressing the crisis and has an inexpensive and comprehensive plan to deal with it. For any medical revolution to succeed in advancing universal healthcare, the plan must prioritize spending in a manner that serves public health and not private interests. It will also require reshuffling private corporate interests and their lobbyists to the sidelines, away from any strategic planning, in order to break up the private interests' control over federal agencies and its revolving door policies. Aside from those who benefit from this medical corruption, the overwhelming majority of Americans would agree with this criticism. However, there is a complete lack of national trust that our legislators, including the so-called progressives, would be willing to undertake such actions.    In addition, America's healthcare system ignores the single most critical initiative to reduce costs - that is, preventative efforts and programs instead of deregulation and closing loopholes designed to protect the drug and insurance industries' bottom line. Prevention can begin with banning toxic chemicals that are proven health hazards associated with current disease epidemics, and it can begin by removing a 1,000-plus toxins already banned in Europe. This should be a no-brainer for any legislator who cares for public health. For example, Stacy Malkan, co-founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, notes that "the policy approach in the US and Europe is dramatically different" when it comes to chemical allowances in cosmetic products. Whereas the EU has banned 1,328 toxic substances from the cosmetic industry alone, the US has banned only 11. The US continues to allow carcinogenic formaldehyde, petroleum, forever chemicals, many parabens (an estrogen mimicker and endocrine hormone destroyer), the highly allergenic p-phenylenediamine or PBD, triclosan, which has been associated with the rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria, avobenzone, and many others to be used in cosmetics, sunscreens, shampoo and hair dyes.   Next, the food Americans consume can be reevaluated for its health benefits. There should be no hesitation to tax the unhealthiest foods, such as commercial junk food, sodas and candy relying on high fructose corn syrup, products that contain ingredients proven to be toxic, and meat products laden with dangerous chemicals including growth hormones and antibiotics. The scientific evidence that the average American diet is contributing to rising disease trends is indisputable. We could also implement additional taxes on the public advertising of these demonstrably unhealthy products. All such tax revenue would accrue to a national universal health program to offset medical expenditures associated with the very illnesses linked to these products. Although such tax measures would help pay for a new medical New Deal, it may be combined with programs to educate the public about healthy nutrition if it is to produce a reduction in the most common preventable diseases. In fact, comprehensive nutrition courses in medical schools should be mandatory because the average physician receives no education in this crucial subject.  In addition, preventative health education should be mandatory throughout public school systems.   Private insurers force hospitals, clinics and private physicians into financial corners, and this is contributing to prodigious waste in money and resources. Annually, healthcare spending towards medical liability insurance costs tens of billions of dollars. In particular, this economic burden has taxed small clinics and physicians. It is well past the time that physician liability insurance is replaced with no-fault options. Today's doctors are spending an inordinate amount of money to protect themselves. Legions of liability and trial lawyers seek big paydays for themselves stemming from physician error. This has created a culture of fear among doctors and hospitals, resulting in the overly cautious practice of defensive medicine, driving up costs and insurance premiums just to avoid lawsuits. Doctors are forced to order unnecessary tests and prescribe more medications and medical procedures just to cover their backsides. No-fault insurance is a common-sense plan that enables physicians to pursue their profession in a manner that will reduce iatrogenic injuries and costs. Individual cases requiring additional medical intervention and loss of income would still be compensated. This would generate huge savings.    No other nation suffers from the scourge of excessive drug price gouging like the US. After many years of haggling to lower prices and increase access to generic drugs, only a minute amount of progress has been made in recent years. A 60 Minutes feature about the Affordable Care Act reported an "orgy of lobbying and backroom deals in which just about everyone with a stake in the $3-trillion-a-year health industry came out ahead—except the taxpayers.” For example, Life Extension magazine reported that an antiviral cream (acyclovir), which had lost its patent protection, "was being sold to pharmacies for 7,500% over the active ingredient cost. The active ingredient (acyclovir) costs only 8 pennies, yet pharmacies are paying a generic maker $600 for this drug and selling it to consumers for around $700." Other examples include the antibiotic Doxycycline. The price per pill averages 7 cents to $3.36 but has a 5,300 percent markup when it reaches the consumer. The antidepressant Clomipramine is marked up 3,780 percent, and the anti-hypertensive drug Captopril's mark-up is 2,850 percent. And these are generic drugs!    Medication costs need to be dramatically cut to allow drug manufacturers a reasonable but not obscene profit margin. By capping profits approximately 100 percent above all costs, we would save our system hundreds of billions of dollars. Such a measure would also extirpate the growing corporate misdemeanors of pricing fraud, which forces patients to pay out-of-pocket in order to make up for the costs insurers are unwilling to pay.    Finally, we can acknowledge that our healthcare is fundamentally a despotic rationing system based upon high insurance costs vis-a-vis a toss of the dice to determine where a person sits on the economic ladder. For the past three decades it has contributed to inequality. The present insurance-based economic metrics cast millions of Americans out of coverage because private insurance costs are beyond their means. Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University political economist, has called our system "brutal" because it "rations [people] out of the system." He defined rationing as "withholding something from someone that is beneficial." Discriminatory healthcare rationing now affects upwards to 60 million people who have been either priced out of the system or under insured. They make too much to qualify for Medicare under Obamacare, yet earn far too little to afford private insurance costs and premiums. In the final analysis, the entire system is discriminatory and predatory.    However, we must be realistic. Almost every member of Congress has benefited from Big Pharma and private insurance lobbyists. The only way to begin to bring our healthcare program up to the level of a truly developed nation is to remove the drug industry's rampant and unnecessary profiteering from the equation.     How did Fauci memory-hole a cure for AIDS and get away with it?   By Helen Buyniski   Over 700,000 Americans have died of AIDS since 1981, with the disease claiming some 42.3 million victims worldwide. While an HIV diagnosis is no longer considered a certain death sentence, the disease looms large in the public imagination and in public health funding, with contemporary treatments running into thousands of dollars per patient annually.   But was there a cure for AIDS all this time - an affordable and safe treatment that was ruthlessly suppressed and attacked by the US public health bureaucracy and its agents? Could this have saved millions of lives and billions of dollars spent on AZT, ddI and failed HIV vaccine trials? What could possibly justify the decision to disappear a safe and effective approach down the memory hole?   The inventor of the cure, Gary Null, already had several decades of experience creating healing protocols for physicians to help patients not responding well to conventional treatments by the time AIDS was officially defined in 1981. Null, a registered dietitian and board-certified nutritionist with a PhD in human nutrition and public health science, was a senior research fellow and Director of Anti-Aging Medicine at the Institute of Applied Biology for 36 years and has published over 950 papers, conducting groundbreaking experiments in reversing biological aging as confirmed with DNA methylation testing. Additionally, Null is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, bestselling author, and investigative journalist whose work exposing crimes against humanity over the last 50 years has highlighted abuses by Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, the financial industry, and the permanent government stay-behind networks that have come to be known as the Deep State.   Null was contacted in 1974 by Dr. Stephen Caiazza, a physician working with a subculture of gay men in New York living the so-called “fast track” lifestyle, an extreme manifestation of the gay liberation movement that began with the Stonewall riots. Defined by rampant sexual promiscuity and copious use of illegal and prescription drugs, including heavy antibiotic use for a cornucopia of sexually-transmitted diseases, the fast-track never included more than about two percent of gay men, though these dominated many of the bathhouses and clubs that defined gay nightlife in the era. These patients had become seriously ill as a result of their indulgence, generally arriving at the clinic with multiple STDs including cytomegalovirus and several types of herpes and hepatitis, along with candida overgrowth, nutritional deficiencies, gut issues, and recurring pneumonia. Every week for the next 10 years, Null would counsel two or three of these men - a total of 800 patients - on how to detoxify their bodies and de-stress their lives, tracking their progress with Caiazza and the other providers at weekly feedback meetings that he credits with allowing the team to quickly evaluate which treatments were most effective. He observed that it only took about two years on the “fast track” for a healthy young person to begin seeing muscle loss and the recurrent, lingering opportunistic infections that would later come to be associated with AIDS - while those willing to commit to a healthier lifestyle could regain their health in about a year.    It was with this background that Null established the Tri-State Healing Center in Manhattan in 1980, staffing the facility with what would eventually run to 22 certified health professionals to offer safe, natural, and effective low- and no-cost treatments to thousands of patients with HIV and AIDS-defining conditions. Null and his staff used variations of the protocols he had perfected with Caiazza's patients, a multifactorial patient-tailored approach that included high-dose vitamin C drips, intravenous ozone therapy, juicing and nutritional improvements and supplementation, aspects of homeopathy and naturopathy with some Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic practices. Additional services offered on-site included acupuncture and holistic dentistry, while peer support groups were also held at the facility so that patients could find community and a positive environment, healing their minds and spirits while they healed their bodies.   “Instead of trying to kill the virus with antiretroviral pharmaceuticals designed to stop viral replication before it kills patients, we focused on what benefits could be gained by building up the patients' natural immunity and restoring biochemical integrity so the body could fight for itself,” Null wrote in a 2014 article describing the philosophy behind the Center's approach, which was wholly at odds with the pharmaceutical model.1   Patients were comprehensively tested every week, with any “recovery” defined solely by the labs, which documented AIDS patient after patient - 1,200 of them - returning to good health and reversing their debilitating conditions. Null claims to have never lost an AIDS patient in the Center's care, even as the death toll for the disease - and its pharmaceutical standard of care AZT - reached an all-time high in the early 1990s. Eight patients who had opted for a more intensive course of treatment - visiting the Center six days a week rather than one - actually sero-deconverted, with repeated subsequent testing showing no trace of HIV in their bodies.   As an experienced clinical researcher himself, Null recognized that any claims made by the Center would be massively scrutinized, challenging as they did the prevailing scientific consensus that AIDS was an incurable, terminal illness. He freely gave his protocols to any medical practitioner who asked, understanding that his own work could be considered scientifically valid only if others could replicate it under the same conditions. After weeks of daily observational visits to the Center, Dr. Robert Cathcart took the protocols back to San Francisco, where he excitedly reported that patients were no longer dying in his care.    Null's own colleague at the Institute of Applied Biology, senior research fellow Elana Avram, set up IV drip rooms at the Institute and used his intensive protocols to sero-deconvert 10 patients over a two-year period. While the experiment had been conducted in secret, as the Institute had been funded by Big Pharma since its inception half a century earlier, Avram had hoped she would be able to publish a journal article to further publicize Null's protocols and potentially help AIDS patients, who were still dying at incredibly high rates thanks to Burroughs Wellcome's noxious but profitable AZT. But as she would later explain in a 2019 letter to Null, their groundbreaking research never made it into print - despite meticulous documentation of their successes - because the Institute's director and board feared their pharmaceutical benefactors would withdraw the funding on which they depended, given that Null's protocols did not involve any patentable or otherwise profitable drugs. When Avram approached them about publication, the board vetoed the idea, arguing that it would “draw negative attention because [the work] was contrary to standard drug treatments.” With no real point in continuing experiments along those lines without institutional support and no hope of obtaining funding from elsewhere, the department she had created specifically for these experiments shut down after a two-year followup with her test subjects - all of whom remained alive and healthy - was completed.2   While the Center was receiving regular visits by this time from medical professionals and, increasingly, black celebrities like Stokely Carmichael and Isaac Hayes, who would occasionally perform for the patients, the news was spreading by word of mouth alone - not a single media outlet had dared to document the clinic that was curing AIDS patients for free. Instead, they gave airtime to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, who had for years been spreading baseless, hysteria-fueling claims about HIV and AIDS to any news outlet that would put him on. His claim that children could contract the virus from “ordinary household conduct” with an infected relative proved so outrageous he had to walk it back,3 and he never really stopped insisting the deadly plague associated with gays and drug users was about to explode like a nuclear bomb among the law-abiding heterosexual population. Fauci by this time controlled all government science funding through NIAID, and his zero-tolerance approach to dissent on the HIV/AIDS front had already seen prominent scientists like virologist Peter Duesberg stripped of the resources they needed for their work because they had dared to question his commandment: There is no cause of AIDS but HIV, and AZT is its treatment. Even the AIDS activist groups, which by then had been coopted by Big Pharma and essentially reduced to astroturfing for the toxic failed chemotherapy drug AZT backed by the institutional might of Fauci's NIAID,4 didn't seem to want to hear that there was a cure. Unconcerned with the irrationality of denouncing the man touting his free AIDS cure as an  “AIDS denier,” they warned journalists that platforming Null or anyone else rejecting the mainstream medical line would be met with organized demands for their firing.    Determined to breach the institutional iron curtain and get his message to the masses, Null and his team staged a press conference in New York, inviting scientists and doctors from around the world to share their research on alternative approaches to HIV and AIDS in 1993. To emphasize the sound scientific basis of the Center's protocols and encourage guests to adopt them into their own practices, Null printed out thousands of abstracts in support of each nutrient and treatment being used. However, despite over 7,000 invitations sent three times to major media, government figures, scientists, and activists, almost none of the intended audience members showed up. Over 100 AIDS patients and their doctors, whose charts exhaustively documented their improvements using natural and nontoxic modalities over the preceding 12 months, gave filmed testimonials, declaring that the feared disease was no longer a death sentence, but the conference had effectively been silenced. Bill Tatum, publisher of the Amsterdam News, suggested Null and his patients would find a more welcoming audience in his home neighborhood of Harlem - specifically, its iconic Apollo Theatre. For three nights, the theater was packed to capacity. Hit especially hard by the epidemic and distrustful of a medical system that had only recently stopped being openly racist (the Tuskegee syphilis experiment only ended in 1972), black Americans, at least, did not seem to care what Anthony Fauci would do if he found out they were investigating alternatives to AZT and death.    PBS journalist Tony Brown, having obtained a copy of the video of patient testimonials from the failed press conference, was among a handful of black journalists who began visiting the Center to investigate the legitimacy of Null's claims. Satisfied they had something significant to offer his audience, Brown invited eight patients - along with Null himself - onto his program over the course of several episodes to discuss the work. It was the first time these protocols had received any attention in the media, despite Null having released nearly two dozen articles and multiple documentaries on the subject by that time. A typical patient on one program, Al, a recovered IV drug user who was diagnosed with AIDS at age 32, described how he “panicked,” saw a doctor and started taking AZT despite his misgivings - only to be forced to discontinue the drug after just a few weeks due to his condition deteriorating rapidly. Researching alternatives brought him to Null, and after six months of “detoxing [his] lifestyle,” he observed his initial symptoms - swollen lymph nodes and weight loss - begin to reverse, culminating with sero-deconversion. On Bill McCreary's Channel 5 program, a married couple diagnosed with HIV described how they watched their T-cell counts increase as they cut out sugar, caffeine, smoking, and drinking and began eating a healthy diet. They also saw the virus leave their bodies.   For HIV-positive viewers surrounded by fear and negativity, watching healthy-looking, cheerful “AIDS patients” detail their recovery while Null backed up their claims with charts must have been balm for the soul. But the TV programs were also a form of outreach to the medical community, with patients' charts always on hand to convince skeptics the cure was scientifically valid. Null brought patients' charts to every program, urging them to keep an open mind: “Other physicians and public health officials should know that there's good science in the alternative perspective. It may not be a therapy that they're familiar with, because they're just not trained in it, but if the results are positive, and you can document them…” He challenged doubters to send in charts from their own sero-deconverted patients on AZT, and volunteered to debate proponents of the orthodox treatment paradigm - though the NIH and WHO both refused to participate in such a debate on Tony Brown's Journal, following Fauci's directive prohibiting engagement with forbidden ideas.    Aside from those few TV programs and Null's own films, suppression of Null's AIDS cure beyond word of mouth was total. The 2021 documentary The Cost of Denial, produced by the Society for Independent Journalists, tells the story of the Tri-State Healing Center and the medical paradigm that sought to destroy it, lamenting the loss of the lives that might have been saved in a more enlightened society. Nurse practitioner Luanne Pennesi, who treated many of the AIDS patients at the Center, speculated in the film that the refusal by the scientific establishment and AIDS activists to accept their successes was financially motivated. “It was as if they didn't want this information to get out. Understand that our healthcare system as we know it is a corporation, it's a corporate model, and it's about generating revenue. My concern was that maybe they couldn't generate enough revenue from these natural approaches.”5   Funding was certainly the main disciplinary tool Fauci's NIAID used to keep the scientific community in line. Despite the massive community interest in the work being done at the Center, no foundation or institution would defy Fauci and risk getting itself blacklisted, leaving Null to continue funding the operation out of his pocket with the profits from book sales. After 15 years, he left the Center in 1995, convinced the mainstream model had so thoroughly been institutionalized that there was no chance of overthrowing it. He has continued to counsel patients and advocate for a reappraisal of the HIV=AIDS hypothesis and its pharmaceutical treatments, highlighting the deeply flawed science underpinning the model of the disease espoused by the scientific establishment in 39 articles, six documentaries and a 700-page textbook on AIDS, but the Center's achievements have been effectively memory-holed by Fauci's multi-billion-dollar propaganda apparatus.     FRUIT OF THE POISONOUS TREE   To understand just how much of a threat Null's work was to the HIV/AIDS establishment, it is instructive to revisit the 1984 paper, published by Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, that established HIV as the sole cause of AIDS. The CDC's official recognition of AIDS in 1981 had done little to quell the mounting public panic over the mysterious illness afflicting gay men in the US, as the agency had effectively admitted it had no idea what was causing them to sicken and die. As years passed with no progress determining the causative agent of the plague, activist groups like Gay Men's Health Crisis disrupted public events and threatened further mass civil disobedience as they excoriated the NIH for its sluggish allocation of government science funding to uncovering the cause of the “gay cancer.”6 When Gallo published his paper declaring that the retrovirus we now know as HIV was the sole “probable” cause of AIDS, its simple, single-factor hypothesis was the answer to the scientific establishment's prayers. This was particularly true for Fauci, as the NIAID chief was able to claim the hot new disease as his agency's own domain in what has been described as a “dramatic confrontation” with his rival Sam Broder at the National Cancer Institute. After all, Fauci pointed out, Gallo's findings - presented by Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler as if they were gospel truth before any other scientists had had a chance to inspect them, never mind conduct a full peer review - clearly classified AIDS as an infectious disease, and not a cancer like the Kaposi's sarcoma which was at the time its most visible manifestation. Money and media attention began pouring in, even as funding for the investigation of other potential causes of AIDS dried up. Having already patented a diagnostic test for “his” retrovirus before introducing it to the world, Gallo was poised for a financial windfall, while Fauci was busily leveraging the discovery into full bureaucratic empire of the US scientific apparatus.   While it would serve as the sole basis for all US government-backed AIDS research to follow - quickly turning Gallo into the most-cited scientist in the world during the 1980s,7 Gallo's “discovery” of HIV was deeply problematic. The sample that yielded the momentous discovery actually belonged to Prof. Luc Montagnier of the French Institut Pasteur, a fact Gallo finally admitted in 1991, four years after a lawsuit from the French government challenged his patent on the HIV antibody test, forcing the US government to negotiate a hasty profit-sharing agreement between Gallo's and Montagnier's labs. That lawsuit triggered a cascade of official investigations into scientific misconduct by Gallo, and evidence submitted during one of these probes, unearthed in 2008 by journalist Janine Roberts, revealed a much deeper problem with the seminal “discovery.” While Gallo's co-author, Mikulas Popovic, had concluded after numerous experiments with the French samples that the virus they contained was not the cause of AIDS, Gallo had drastically altered the paper's conclusion, scribbling his notes in the margins, and submitted it for publication to the journal Science without informing his co-author.   After Roberts shared her discovery with contacts in the scientific community, 37 scientific experts wrote to the journal demanding that Gallo's career-defining HIV paper be retracted from Science for lacking scientific integrity.8 Their call, backed by an endorsement from the 2,600-member scientific organization Rethinking AIDS, was ignored by the publication and by the rest of mainstream science despite - or perhaps because of - its profound implications.   That 2008 letter, addressed to Science editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts and copied to American Association for the Advancement of Science CEO Alan Leshner, is worth reproducing here in its entirety, as it utterly dismantles Gallo's hypothesis - and with them the entire HIV is the sole cause of AIDS dogma upon which the contemporary medical model of the disease rests:   On May 4, 1984 your journal published four papers by a group led by Dr. Robert Gallo. We are writing to express our serious concerns with regard to the integrity and veracity of the lead paper among these four of which Dr. Mikulas Popovic is the lead author.[1] The other three are also of concern because they rely upon the conclusions of the lead paper .[2][3][4]  In the early 1990s, several highly critical reports on the research underlying these papers were produced as a result of governmental inquiries working under the supervision of scientists nominated by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. The Office of Research Integrity of the US Department of Health and Human Services concluded that the lead paper was “fraught with false and erroneous statements,” and that the “ORI believes that the careless and unacceptable keeping of research records...reflects irresponsible laboratory management that has permanently impaired the ability to retrace the important steps taken.”[5] Further, a Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations led by US Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan produced a staff report on the papers which contains scathing criticisms of their integrity.[6]  Despite the publically available record of challenges to their veracity, these papers have remained uncorrected and continue to be part of the scientific record.  What prompts our communication today is the recent revelation of an astonishing number of previously unreported deletions and unjustified alterations made by Gallo to the lead paper. There are several documents originating from Gallo's laboratory that, while available for some time, have only recently been fully analyzed. These include a draft of the lead paper typewritten by Popovic which contains handwritten changes made to it by Gallo.[7] This draft was the key evidence used in the above described inquiries to establish that Gallo had concealed his laboratory's use of a cell culture sample (known as LAV) which it received from the Institut Pasteur.  These earlier inquiries verified that the typed manuscript draft was produced by Popovic who had carried out the recorded experiment while his laboratory chief, Gallo, was in Europe and that, upon his return, Gallo changed the document by hand a few days before it was submitted to Science on March 30, 1984. According to the ORI investigation, “Dr. Gallo systematically rewrote the manuscript for what would become a renowned LTCB [Gallo's laboratory at the National Cancer Institute] paper.”[5]  This document provided the important evidence that established the basis for awarding Dr. Luc Montagnier and Dr. Francoise Barré-Sinoussi the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the AIDS virus by proving it was their samples of LAV that Popovic used in his key experiment. The draft reveals that Popovic had forthrightly admitted using the French samples of LAV renamed as Gallo's virus, HTLV-III, and that Gallo had deleted this admission, concealing their use of LAV.  However, it has not been previously reported that on page three of this same document Gallo had also deleted Popovic's unambiguous statement that, "Despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified,” replacing it in the published paper with a statement that said practically the opposite, namely, “That a retrovirus of the HTLV family might be an etiologic agent of AIDS was suggested by the findings.”  It is clear that the rest of Popovic's typed paper is entirely consistent with his statement that the cause of AIDS had not been found, despite his use of the French LAV. Popovic's final conclusion was that the culture he produced “provides the possibility” for detailed studies. He claimed to have achieved nothing more. At no point in his paper did Popovic attempt to prove that any virus caused AIDS, and it is evident that Gallo concealed these key elements in Popovic's experimental findings.  It is astonishing now to discover these unreported changes to such a seminal document. We can only assume that Gallo's alterations of Popovic's conclusions were not highlighted by earlier inquiries because the focus at the time was on establishing that the sample used by Gallo's lab came from Montagnier and was not independently collected by Gallo. In fact, the only attention paid to the deletions made by Gallo pertains to his effort to hide the identity of the sample. The questions of whether Gallo and Popovic's research proved that LAV or any other virus was the cause of AIDS were clearly not considered.  Related to these questions are other long overlooked documents that merit your attention. One of these is a letter from Dr. Matthew A. Gonda, then Head of the Electron Microscopy Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, which is addressed to Popovic, copied to Gallo and dated just four days prior to Gallo's submission to Science.[8] In this letter, Gonda remarks on samples he had been sent for imaging because “Dr Gallo wanted these micrographs for publication because they contain HTLV.” He states, “I do not believe any of the particles photographed are of HTLV-I, II or III.” According to Gonda, one sample contained cellular debris, while another had no particles near the size of a retrovirus. Despite Gonda's clearly worded statement, Science published on May 4, 1984 papers attributed to Gallo et al with micrographs attributed to Gonda and described unequivocally as HTLV-III.  In another letter by Gallo, dated one day before he submitted his papers to Science, Gallo states, “It's extremely rare to find fresh cells [from AIDS patients] expressing the virus... cell culture seems to be necessary to induce virus,” a statement which raises the possibility he was working with a laboratory artifact. [9]  Included here are copies of these documents and links to the same. The very serious flaws they reveal in the preparation of the lead paper published in your journal in 1984 prompts our request that this paper be withdrawn. It appears that key experimental findings have been concealed. We further request that the three associated papers published on the same date also be withdrawn as they depend on the accuracy of this paper.  For the scientific record to be reliable, it is vital that papers shown to be flawed, or falsified be retracted. Because a very public record now exists showing that the Gallo papers drew unjustified conclusions, their withdrawal from Science is all the more important to maintain integrity. Future researchers must also understand they cannot rely on the 1984 Gallo papers for statements about HIV and AIDS, and all authors of papers that previously relied on this set of four papers should have the opportunity to consider whether their own conclusions are weakened by these revelations.      Gallo's handwritten revision, submitted without his colleague's knowledge despite multiple experiments that failed to support the new conclusion, was the sole foundation for the HIV=AIDS hypothesis. Had Science published the manuscript the way Popovic had typed it, there would be no AIDS “pandemic” - merely small clusters of people with AIDS. Without a viral hypothesis backing the development of expensive and deadly pharmaceuticals, would Fauci have allowed these patients to learn about the cure that existed all along?   Faced with a potential rebellion, Fauci marshaled the full resources under his control to squelch the publication of the investigations into Gallo and restrict any discussion of competing hypotheses in the scientific and mainstream press, which had been running virus-scare stories full-time since 1984. The effect was total, according to biochemist Dr. Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) procedure. In a 2009 interview, Mullis recalled his own shock when he attempted to unearth the experimental basis for the HIV=AIDS hypothesis. Despite his extensive inquiry into the literature, “there wasn't a scientific reference…[that] said ‘here's how come we know that HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.' There was nothing out there like that.”9 This yawning void at the core of HIV/AIDS “science" turned him into a strident critic of AIDS dogma - and those views made him persona non grata where the scientific press was concerned, suddenly unable to publish a single paper despite having won the Nobel Prize for his invention of the PCR test just weeks before.  10   DISSENT BECOMES “DENIAL”   While many of those who dissent from the orthodox HIV=AIDS view believe HIV plays a role in the development of AIDS, they point to lifestyle and other co-factors as being equally if not more important. Individuals who test positive for HIV can live for decades in perfect health - so long as they don't take AZT or the other toxic antivirals fast-tracked by Fauci's NIAID - but those who developed full-blown AIDS generally engaged in highly risky behaviors like extreme promiscuity and prodigious drug abuse, contracting STDs they took large quantities of antibiotics to treat, further running down their immune systems. While AIDS was largely portrayed as a “gay disease,” it was only the “fast track” gays, hooking up with dozens of partners nightly in sex marathons fueled by “poppers” (nitrate inhalants notorious for their own devastating effects on the immune system), who became sick. Kaposi's sarcoma, one of the original AIDS-defining conditions, was widespread among poppers-using gay men, but never appeared among IV drug users or hemophiliacs, the other two main risk groups during the early years of the epidemic. Even Robert Gallo himself, at a 1994 conference on poppers held by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, would admit that the previously-rare form of skin cancer surging among gay men was not primarily caused by HIV - and that it was immune stimulation, rather than suppression, that was likely responsible.11 Similarly, IV drug users are often riddled with opportunistic infections as their habit depresses the immune system and their focus on maintaining their addiction means that healthier habits - like good nutrition and even basic hygiene - fall by the wayside.    Supporting the call for revising the HIV=AIDS hypothesis to include co-factors is the fact that the mass heterosexual outbreaks long predicted by Fauci and his ilk in seemingly every country on Earth have failed to materialize, except - supposedly - in Africa, where the diagnostic standard for AIDS differs dramatically from those of the West. Given the prohibitively high cost of HIV testing for poor African nations, the WHO in 1985 crafted a diagnostic loophole that became known as the “Bangui definition,” allowing medical professionals to diagnose AIDS in the absence of a test using just clinical symptoms: high fever, persistent cough, at least 30 days of diarrhea, and the loss of 10% of one's body weight within two months. Often suffering from malnutrition and without access to clean drinking water, many of the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa fit the bill, especially when the WHO added tuberculosis to the list of AIDS-defining illnesses in 1993 - a move which may be responsible for as many as one half of African “AIDS” cases, according to journalist Christine Johnson. The WHO's former Chief of Global HIV Surveillance, James Chin, acknowledged their manipulation of statistics, but stressed that it was the entire AIDS industry - not just his organization - perpetrating the fraud. “There's the saying that, if you knew what sausages are made of, most people would hesitate to sort of eat them, because they wouldn't like what's in it. And if you knew how HIV/AIDS numbers are cooked, or made up, you would use them with extreme caution,” Chin told an interviewer in 2009.12   With infected numbers stubbornly remaining constant in the US despite Fauci's fearmongering projections of the looming heterosexually-transmitted plague, the CDC in 1993 broadened its definition of AIDS to include asymptomatic (that is, healthy) HIV-positive people with low T-cell counts - an absurd criteria given that an individual's T-cell count can fluctuate by hundreds within a single day. As a result, the number of “AIDS cases” in the US immediately doubled. Supervised by Fauci, the NIAID had been quietly piling on diseases into the “AIDS-related” category for years, bloating the list from just two conditions - pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma - to 30 so fast it raised eyebrows among some of science's leading lights. Deeming the entire process “bizarre” and unprecedented, Kary Mullis wondered aloud why no one had called the AIDS establishment out: “There's something wrong here. And it's got to be financial.”13   Indeed, an early CDC public relations campaign was exposed by the Wall Street Journal in 1987 as having deliberately mischaracterized AIDS as a threat to the entire population so as to garner increased public and private funding for what was very much a niche issue, with the risk to average heterosexuals from a single act of sex “smaller than the risk of ever getting hit by lightning.” Ironically, the ads, which sought to humanize AIDS patients in an era when few Americans knew anyone with the disease and more than half the adult population thought infected people should be forced to carry cards warning of their status, could be seen as a reaction to the fear tactics deployed by Fauci early on.14   It's hard to tell where fraud ends and incompetence begins with Gallo's HIV antibody test. Much like Covid-19 would become a “pandemic of testing,” with murder victims and motorcycle crashes lumped into “Covid deaths” thanks to over-sensitized PCR tests that yielded as many as 90% false positives,15 HIV testing is fraught with false positives - and unlike with Covid-19, most people who hear they are HIV-positive still believe they are receiving a death sentence. Due to the difficulty of isolating HIV itself from human samples, the most common diagnostic tests, ELISA and the Western Blot, are designed to detect not the virus but antibodies to it, upending the traditional medical understanding that the presence of antibodies indicates only exposure - and often that the body has actually vanquished the pathogen. Patients are known to test positive for HIV antibodies in the absence of the virus due to at least 70 other conditions, including hepatitis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, syphilis, recent vaccination or even pregnancy. (https://www.chcfl.org/diseases-that-can-cause-a-false-positive-hiv-test/) Positive results are often followed up with a PCR “viral load” test, even though the inventor of the PCR technique Kary Mullis famously condemned its misuse as a tool for diagnosing infection. Packaging inserts for all three tests warn the user that they cannot be reliably used to diagnose HIV.16 The ELISA HIV antibody test explicitly states: “At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence and absence of HIV antibody in human blood.”17   That the public remains largely unaware of these and other massive holes in the supposedly airtight HIV=AIDS=DEATH paradigm is a testament to Fauci's multi-layered control of the press. Like the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration and other Covid-19 dissidents, scientists who question HIV/AIDS dogma have been brutally punished for their heresy, no matter how prestigious their prior standing in the field and no matter how much evidence they have for their own claims. In 1987, the year the FDA's approval of AZT made AIDS the most profitable epidemic yet (a dubious designation Covid-19 has since surpassed), Fauci made it clearer than ever that scientific inquiry and debate - the basis of the scientific method - would no longer be welcome in the American public health sector, eliminating retrovirologist Peter Duesberg, then one of the most prominent opponents of the HIV=AIDS hypothesis, from the scientific conversation with a professional disemboweling that would make a cartel hitman blush. Duesberg had just eviscerated Gallo's 1984 HIV paper with an article of his own in the journal Cancer Research, pointing out that retroviruses had never before been found to cause a single disease in humans - let alone 30 AIDS-defining diseases. Rather than allow Gallo or any of the other scientists in his camp to respond to the challenge, Fauci waged a scorched-earth campaign against Duesberg, who had until then been one of the most highly regarded researchers in his field. Every research grant he requested was denied; every media appearance was canceled or preempted. The University of California at Berkeley, unable to fully fire him due to tenure, took away his lab, his graduate students, and the rest of his funding. The few colleagues who dared speak up for him in public were also attacked, while enemies and opportunists were encouraged to slander Duesberg at the conferences he was barred from attending and in the journals that would no longer publish his replies. When Duesberg was summoned to the White House later that year by then-President Ronald Reagan to debate Fauci on the origins of AIDS, Fauci convinced the president to cancel, allegedly pulling rank on the Commander-in-Chief with an accusation that the “White House was interfering in scientific matters that belonged to the NIH and the Office of Science and Technology Assessment.” After seven years of this treatment, Duesberg was contacted by NIH official Stephen O'Brien and offered an escape from professional purgatory. He could have “everything back,” he was told, and shown a manuscript of a scientific paper - apparently commissioned by the editor of the journal Nature - “HIV Causes AIDS: Koch's Postulates Fulfilled” with his own name listed alongside O'Brien's as an author.18 His refusal to take the bribe effectively guaranteed the epithet “AIDS denier” will appear on his tombstone. The character assassination of Duesberg became a template that would be deployed to great effectiveness wherever Fauci encountered dissent - never debate, only demonize, deplatform and destroy.    Even Luc Montagnier, the real discoverer of HIV, soon found himself on the wrong side of the Fauci machine. With his 1990 declaration that “the HIV virus [by itself] is harmless and passive, a benign virus,” Montagnier began distancing himself from Gallo's fraud, effectively placing a target on his own back. In a 1995 interview, he elaborated: “four factors that have come together to account for the sudden epidemic [of AIDS]: HIV presence, immune hyper-activation, increased sexually transmitted disease incidence, sexual behavior changes and other behavioral changes” such as drug use, poor nutrition and stress - all of which he said had to occur “essentially simultaneously” for HIV to be transmitted, creating the modern epidemic. Like the professionals at the Tri-State Healing Center, Montagnier advocated for the use of antioxidants like vitamin C and N-acetyl cysteine, naming oxidative stress as a critical factor in the progression from HIV to AIDS.19 When Montagnier died in 2022, Fauci's media mouthpieces sneered that the scientist (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2008 for his discovery of HIV, despite his flagging faith in that discovery's significance) “started espousing views devoid of a scientific basis” in the late 2000s, leading him to be “shunned by the scientific community.”20 In a particularly egregious jab, the Washington Post's obit sings the praises of Robert Gallo, implying it was the American scientist who really should have won the Nobel for HIV, while dismissing as “

Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy is arguably the most widely-distributed piece of criticism of the marketing industry in recent times. We sit down with the doc's producer Flora Bagenal and one of its star interviewees, former Adidas brand chief Eric Liedtke. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yesterday, we spoke with one of the most brilliant minds in politics in America, and one of the most brilliant in the world: Anat Shenker-Osorio. She's a messaging guru, who I met when I was reporting my book, The Persuaders — there's a whole chapter about her in it — and ever since at The Ink we have often turned to her whenever we need the best advice.But she's so much more than a messaging guru. She's a comedian. She is a person who, in spite of her messaging prowess, will always say something that really pokes and inflames people, but she does it intentionally, to provoke them into seeing what they might not otherwise have recognized. And in a moment when so many people do not know what to say, or how to say it — or seem to have lost the use of their vocal cords and spines — she is someone we can ask to tell people what they should be saying, because she knows just how to frame the most important questions of this time, and has answers for so many of them.For those who've been looking for leadership from above, she made it very clear that nicely asking Democrats to do something has never brought about real change. So stop doing that. Stop trying to get Chuck Schumer to do something.This conversation is an incredibly practical guide to what you need to — and can — do. Anyone and everyone can lead: we make the future, and it's time to do it by stepping up. If you want to, you are a leader!Congrats! Sorry. But congrats!You can start by creating social proof locally — which is to say, create a perception in your community that lots of people feel the way you feel. You might start with signs, hats, talking to people, or, as she put it, the painting of a barn. Just pick something, and get started. And soon enough you'll be leading.If you're not sure where to jump in, Anat's team keeps track of actions across the country, so visit her ever-evolving list of Ways to Resist. And read her Freedom over Fascism toolkit for tons of ideas and insight into how to communicate all of the ideas you'll find below.We know some of you prefer reading to watching, so we're publishing text excerpts of the conversation below. If you missed our live conversation, we encourage you to watch the entire video above.In the public interest, we are opening this video and transcript to all. But we're also asking candidly that folks support the half dozen or so people who now write for and edit and otherwise support the work of The Ink by becoming a paying subscriber today.Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.Your support allows us to open these ideas to as many people as possible, with no paywall.I wanted to start maybe on a positive-ish note by asking you who is telling the right story right now? Who do you see in the pro-democracy movement? And I know that your answer to this may not take a lot of time because it may not be a very long list of people, but who is telling the right story?Well, let's start with a story that you helped bring to light, in your Live with Senator Chris Murphy. I thought he was absolutely spot-on in many ways. I don't know whether we'll come back to this, but I thought his response in particular when you held his feet somewhat to the fire about why other Democratic leaders are not stepping up. That was probably him at his most diplomatic. But I thought his description of reality was really spot on.Unsurprisingly, he's an MVP, is always there, always prescient, always saying the thing, speaking truth, not just to power, but ensuring we're speaking truth to each other.AOC, Jasmine Crockett, obviously. Governor Pritzker's responses yesterday were extraordinary. Exactly what's needed. And then outside of the elected official space, there's a lot going on. There are burgeoning protest movements, both from known organizations like Indivisible and Move On and Working Families Party, but also from brand newbies that just self-assembled on Substack, like the 50501 movement, and the burgeoning general strike movement.And because there's no up without a down, as they say, who is getting it most dramatically and maybe for you infuriatingly wrong?Do you want to open this Pandora's box? You know, the list is very, very, very long.One might say infinite.Most infuriatingly, it's the siren song of the authoritarian that they are fomenting a counterrevolution against a revolution that never occurred. This has always been their story, time and place immemorial, that you're being attacked, you're being put upon by some usurping minority, whether that be immigrants, whether that be Roma people in Hungary, whether that be people seeking asylum in Australia, whether that be Southern Europeans in the case of Brexit, whether that be trans people. It's always some other who is coming to get you and they have amassed too much power.And so I think what is most infuriating beyond just the absolute unwillingness to locate a single vertebra let alone a spine is the layering on of the misdiagnosis of why we are here when we blame when we make believe that the people with too much power in our society are undocumented immigrants and trans people. If it weren't so pathetic and sad it would be funny. So I think that that is what is particularly infuriating.Talk to me about specific moments in the last month where you've seen someone give a press conference, you've seen someone give a floor speech — give me the hall of shame because I consider you one of the only people, frankly, who I could ask to do that and you'll just do it.I mean, who am I most disappointed by? I think I'm extraordinarily disappointed by many of our senators. I'm thinking in particular, really sadly, because of all the extraordinary work that I know movement groups like Lucha in Arizona went to, putting him into power. But Ruben Gallego, not only refusing to stand up to this administration but also actively sponsoring the Laken Riley bill, which let's not kid ourselves, is about eliminating due process rights. It is about creating an unjust — even more unjust — legal system in the name of genuflecting at the altar of immigrants are the problem.I think that Amy Klobuchar has said things that are really infuriating and incensing. I think obviously Chuck Schumer's stance of, “We'll just rap about the price of eggs.” Hakeem Jeffries, in a very similar vein, and just a lot of, “Well, we can't do anything. We don't have any power.” Excuse making.It's so interesting when you see a lot of the folks on TV and when you're under a Biden presidency or an Obama presidency maybe you don't notice the mediocrity as much because it doesn't like risk the republic — and now to see some of those same people, they're not evil or awful the way that we're talking about on the right, but they are so profoundly mediocre and not up to the task of responding to a once-in-a-century emergency.You know, I referenced earlier before the conversation that you had with Senator Murphy and I was reflecting, because obviously I spend a lot of time listening to people because if you want to be decent at messaging, you have to spend a lot of time listening to people.And by listening to people, I mean in focus groups where we are asking them deep questions, we are extracting metaphors, we are uncovering their underlying assumptions and beliefs about what is going on. What is the origin story behind it? What are their desired solutions?And so I think a lot about what people's underlying motivations are, and the psychology of how they came to be where they are and doing what they're doing. And I think when I think about these folks who have risen to the halls of power, it kind of makes sense because to be honest, that they're behaving in these milquetoast ways.Is that what it takes to get there?Well, partly it's what it takes to get there, but also it is an accurate fact that that has worked for them. The things that they have done in their life have brought them to The New York Times newsroom, because — let's just widen the net of culpability a little bit here — has brought them to the pinnacle of journalism, has brought them to the pinnacle of politics, has brought them to the pinnacle of whatever it is I assume they desired to do once they became old enough to have a thing that they really wanted to do.And so… If taking certain steps and engaging in certain ways and refusing to upset people has been successful or at least successful within a trajectory that you define for yourself, then it actually kind of makes a lot of sense that random lady with big hair being like, “What the actual f**k are you doing? There's a hostile takeover of our government happening on your watch, friend.”It feels like, well, this has worked for me and it has achieved the things that I desire to achieve. So why would I change course?So here's something I'm struggling with. I think part of what explains the election loss going back to November is this problem you and I have talked about before of a tendency to kind of misappraise what is really, really salient with people. And you are someone who studies this and measures it. There are things you and I are worried about. There are things you've been screaming about that it turns out, way more people should be worried about it than are.If you were right about the election, if I was right about the election, a lot more people should have been concerned about things that, maybe did not reach the top rank.And so even now, now that we're in this presidency, I struggle with my own sense of how grave this is, how serious this is.This is a coup. This is that. And then sometimes I just, I live in New York City. Like I've walked down the street. I see people living their lives. These are people, 90 percent of them vote for Democrats, but you can just tell, if you sit in a restaurant, you hear conversations or you watch a normal TV show, the Jennifer Hudson talk show, you see normal life. And normal people living their lives are not living as though, as Senator Murphy says, this is the most serious crisis since the civil war and we may be a few months from irreversibly losing democracy.So my maybe difficult question for you is, is this thing that you and I share, this concern that everybody watching this shares. Is this concern out of touch in some way, maybe accurate, but is it out of sync with how regular people read things? Are we too ahead of the curve? Is it not landing with people?Talk to me about that disconnect.Yeah, it is not landing with people.So I want to say two things about that. The first is that in the lead-up to the election, I coined this phrase, the credulity chasm. And what the credulity chasm means is that when we look at the fundamental attitude that was most predictive of voting for Harris versus doing something else, and by something else I mean voting for Trump, staying at home, voting third party, etc.It wasn't, “Wow, that Project 2025 agenda, that sounds real sweet. That's like a Baskin Robbins tasty level of flavors. I'm excited.” It was whether or not people believed the agenda would come true. So this notion that the country has shifted rightwards is actually not supported by data.What has actually happened — and what happened through the election — was what the people who got it were saying: “No, it's for realsies. This is not hyperbolic. This threat is real. And all of this will come to pass and come to fruition.”And in fact, there's a Project 2025 tracker that shows that already within this first month of being in a hostile takeover, they have made good on one-third of the Project 2025 agenda. Just a little side note.So that credulity chasm, which I would argue we are still in — it is a basic facet of human psychology, and we see this among respondents in many, many parts of the world.This is not a uniquely U.S. phenomenon, but there's a U.S. layer on top of it that John Jost, the psychologist at NYU, calls system justification theory. Basically, there's kind of a fundamental human need to feel like I can predict what's going to happen. Tomorrow is going to be somewhat like today. Things are more or less okay. Things happen for a reason. Good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. There's a fundamental explanation for the universe because to question that and to really truly be living within that — the badness or the recognition of the badness, I should say — it requires a level of upset and a level of agitation and a level of awareness that is understandably very difficult for most people, because for most people, the basic facets of life, like being able to see a doctor, being able to help out your parents when their water heater breaks and being able to send your kid to university, et cetera, is pretty challenging.And so to ask people to layer on another thing is a lot. And I think that what we are experiencing over and over again, and it's been happening for a while. It's the frogs in boiling water problem, where we truly think this is a hot tub. And a little toasty, get a little cozy. But, you know, it's winter and a hot tub is nice and winter in most parts of the country. And I'm joking, but not by much.Anticipating this is actually why it is absolutely so fundamental that we be crystal clear and that our leaders be crystal clear that what's happening is in fact what's happening because not every problem that is named can be faced, but zero problems that we refuse to name and refuse to recognize can actually be faced. And this is where I think the strategy of hat in hand, please, sir, may I have a tuppence begging Democrats to locate a spine is wrong. And we need to stop pushing in that direction.Okay, but I guess what I'm wondering is, and I wonder this very personally, because I'm afraid that I'm doing it wrong.When I see Elon Musk shadow presidenting his way through these agencies. It basically gets rid of Congress. I mean, it's as grave a series of things as you know. And I talk about Elon Musk's anti-constitutional coup. I feel like I am describing reality as clearly as I can. I feel like I'm saying things that, given what I understand about this country and what people claim to care about, should be ringing bells.And I also feel like I can almost hear with that double consciousness, people are not going to care about that. Everybody watching this is going to care about this, right? But not all the people not watching this, who actually outnumber the people watching this. And so, is that even just doing it wrong? Like, should it just be, “Your grandma's social security check is in danger?” Like, just the practical things?Because this kind of parallels the whole thing in the election about crime and eggs and democracy, all that stuff. Am I doing it wrong when I really fixate on the anti-constitutional coup by Elon Musk?You're right to fixate on it. You're wrong in voter-facing and public-facing messaging to call it that. And it's for the reasons you've already intuited. The Constitution is an abstraction, even though it is actually a physical document, I am aware. Whenever we are in the language of protecting institutions, protecting norms, protecting democracy — democracy never bought anyone dinner.And in point of fact, the way that most people, the way that the average American thinks about democracy, if they think about it at all, is the system as it is presently construed. The thing that we have now. And by the way, the thing that we have now, I'm not loving. I'm not very fond of it.So anytime our language, our messaging implies that what we are asking for is a return to January 19th, 2025, meaning right before inauguration, people weren't psyched about that day either. And so the answer is, As you've already intuited, is how do we make it person-facing, voter-facing, American-facing? How do we make it tangible?So what do we say? We say: “This is a government of the bullies for the billionaires.” Trump and the billionaires who bought him, Musk — you can name both of them, you can name either of them — are coming for your life and your livelihood. He is coming for your freedom. He is coming for your privacy. He is coming for your information. And he is conducting a hostile takeover of our government so he can take our money.”That's the simplest way of expressing it.But do you think that is working? Right now?It's not happening enough. But, you know, I can tell you from experimentation, both within focus groups and within our own internal polling that we continuously do. Yes, the most the highest impact way that we can characterize what Musk is doing is, “a hostile takeover of our government and an armed robbery of our money and our and our very deliberate there.But ultimately, there is absolutely nothing that we can say that will ever be as loud as what we can do.Yes, we should be calling our representatives. And yes, we are rightly incensed about the fact that these people who purportedly have sworn an oath to govern in our name apparently can't be bothered to work on Fridays and, you know, don't want to use the mechanisms at their disposal to throw sand in the wheels of government in order to stop this hostile takeover.Infuriating. Rightly so. Call them. Call the Republicans, too. But understand what has stopped autocracy in other places and within our own history, when we think about the civil rights movement, when we think about ACT UP, when we think about the movement to get the Americans with Disabilities Act, and women's suffrage.Imagine if the Montgomery bus boycott folks were like, “I know, here's an idea. Let's ask the Democrats if they would pretty please end this whole completely unjust, horrifying segregation thing.”Or when folks newly in the throes of the HIV AIDS crisis, dying en masse from this disease that apparently came out of nowhere, watching their loved ones suffer and struggle, if they were like, “You know what we should do? We should ask the Democrats if they would pretty please do something about this.”No, that isn't what they did. They broke into the New York Stock Exchange, as you may know, and they hung a banner from where the bell gets rung saying, “Sell Burroughs Wellcome” which is the pharmaceutical corporation that was making AZT at the time.And sure enough, by the end of the month, the price had dropped. And not that much later, there had been an appropriations bill, the Ryan White bill, to actually bring money into this fight and force research and so on.And so what we do is so much louder than what we say, because what we do, people being out in the world saying, physically opposing this and speaking about it and writing songs about it and making parodies and making TikToks and painting “F**k the Fascists” on the side of their barn.That is actually what sways public opinion. What sways public opinion is what we call social proof. People do the things they think people like them do.And so it's this chicken-and-egg problem where you're walking around New York or I'm walking around the Bay area or someone's walking around in the middle of America and you don't see anyone else freaking out. You don't see anyone else angry. You don't see anyone else upset. And so you're like, I guess really nothing's happening. And so it's about the doing more than it is about the saying.This is so important what you're saying. And it's reframing something for me.It's almost like when we talk about protest, mass mobilization right now, resistance, I think the frame in people's mind is, the object of that is the right. You're protesting against the right, you're resisting the right. And you're hoping for maybe Democrats to be part of this. You're the subject opposing that object and you're kind of inviting them to be part of the subject.And you're reframing this like, no, no, no, the Democrats are like a second object. They're not here. They're there. They're another thing you are mobilizing against for different reasons. It's a different kind of mobilization. But you are mobilizing against their passivity and then against the things the right is doing.Does that sound right?I mean, yes and no. I think… and feel free to lob the charge of hypocrisy at me. Bring it on, because I'm about to perform a big old hypocrisy on you.I'm obviously extraordinarily pissed off at Democrats. I have spent the last many years of my career helping elect Democrats. And so you can understand how it feels especially galling to me and many of you. However, it is the fact that when our public discourse — this is where you're going to come at me, come at me because I'm guilty. Do as I say, not as I post, I would say.When we are loudly saying, “Democrats aren't doing this, Democrats aren't doing that, Democrats are weak here, Democrats are weak there, Democrats refuse.” Then that is the narrative. That is the discourse that is in the public. And insofar as people continue to view the Democrats as the rightful centerpiece of the opposition — which is a reasonable conclusion, they're purportedly the opposition party in a duopoly — it looks like the regime is unopposed. What the regime is doing is fine. People are largely O.K. with it.And so because in life you cannot actually make other people do things — it is very, very unfortunate. It's one of the hard lessons of parenting. You can't actually physically make people do things. You can only really focus on what you're doing.I'm not saying stop pressuring them, but I'm saying what would actually cause a sea change among the calcified leadership — and yes, hashtag not all Democrats, there are extraordinary Democrats who are doing the right thing, as we said earlier — is when there is a mass movement.Actually they're not leaders, they don't go first, literally, to lead means to go first. That's really all it means. And so that means that every single one of you listening right now: If you want to, you're a leader. If you want to, you're a leader.Let's look, for example, at the Black Lives Matter resurgence that happened in 2020. During that protest, during that June, public opinion of BLM moved ahead by 12 points. It was only when the protests stopped And the right-wing coordinated backlash happened that opinion swayed back, which was an intentional thing.The same thing with the Muslim ban. When Trump was first promising the Muslim ban during his first run, it polled popular.But when it actually happened, and people took the extraordinary step of driving to the airport. And you live in New York. Nobody drives — your wife doesn't drive you to the airport. I don't know your business, but I'm telling you that. Who drives to LAX? Who drives to SFO? Nobody drives to these airports. That is not a thing that happens to everyday Americans.It's showing, not telling — showing, not telling — that they are against this. That is actually what altered people's perceptions of whether or not the Muslim ban was okay or not.So that's really it. And that is what drags Democrats along. It's ordinary people showing that they disagree.So this is so helpful and you are always so helpful. Even though I've spent so long engaging with your work, there's like a particular unlock here. And a lot of people are responding to that also. I'm just going to try to summarize.I hear your point on managing the correct level of infighting or criticizing Dems. You talk about calling your representative, pressuring them to do things.Your idea about painting the barn really struck me because a lot of people — everyone who subscribes to The Ink, all their comments are like, “I call everybody, I do this, nothing's happening.”And I don't think a lot of people have thought of it as what you said, which is, yes, you're trying to pressure some leaders, but a very tangible thing you can do is increase the perception of people around you about the number of people who feel this way.Exactly. Because that is something you can do and you can measure. I'm not saying don't do the calling your reps and stuff, but that stuff just feels so remote to people I know.And people are so frustrated, like changing the perception about the number of people who feel that way around you. That is like a marching order.And the other thing to recognize and to realize, and we have a running list that we just keep for ourselves for our team of the actions that are happening right now. It is by no means comprehensive. It couldn't possibly be comprehensive — stuff is popping up everywhere. It's just the stuff that comes across our radar.Do you know how many people go to the average school board meeting in most towns? Do you know how quickly and easily you and two, three, four of your friends will be the only people at the school board meeting?A lot of what has happened in our politics is that we actually stopped organizing. And a lot of the heroic, extraordinary, wonderful organizations that I admire and respect and like count as colleagues, we all became so fixated on channeling ourselves through the electoral process. And that means that instead of organizing, everybody moved to field and called it organizing. And by field, I mean getting people registered, getting people to vote. Fine, do that. I'm not knocking it.But that's not organizing. That is not organizing. And we need to stop kidding ourselves. Organizing is finding out who runs the PTA in your town? Who runs the biggest church? Who are the Boy Scout leaders? Who are the Girl Scout leaders? Are you actually talking to people and radicalizing them in the original definition? You know, radical just means “to the root,” right? Are you actually radicalizing them in a new political understanding of what is happening? Why is it happening? And what is the origin of it? Where does it come from?So that they can withstand all of these constant right-wing drumbeats that say it's the immigrants or it's the Black people or it's the trans people or it's whomever, it's the Muslims. So that they actually have an authentic consciousness and that they themselves then are talking to other people.That's organizing.And so go local. I cannot emphasize enough, especially if you live in a smaller place, especially if you live in a red state, in a purple district, whatever.You show up at your school board meeting and the two of you or the three of you or the four of you, you show up at your city council, you're the only people there. These fascist policies, yes, they are being constructed at the national level. Of course, they are. But they have to be implemented at the local level. And it is at the local level.Let's just take, for instance, Aurora, Colorado. That is where they want to massively expand a detention facility. In order to continue with their evil draconian plan of concentration camps for people who happen to not have been born here and, you know, speak English with the wrong accent, apparently.So Aurora is not Manhattan. It is not Los Angeles. It is not D.C. It is a particular town with a particular city council with a particular set of folks. And right now there is a battle going on to define Aurora, to massively expanded detention facility there.People in that town and surrounding communities could go and say, “We are Aurora.” They could do food trucks of every ethnicity, and nationality. They could do giant dance parties saying, “We are Aurora. This is what we believe.”I'm going to go to Aurora as they do all this. I mean, as God is my witness, I will. This is my pledge: I am going to make a 10,000 or however many food truck caravan from every contiguous state to D.C, in order to have the largest bhangra, K-pop, salsa, samba, polka — I'm not intentionally leaving out any kind of music fill in all the musics — dance party to show not tell that immigrants are awesome.Because we can not live, we can not survive in a dual narrative or a three-part narrative in which immigrants are either villains, which is of course what the right says, or they're victims, which is all too often, sadly, where we have been in advocacy. What I call the ay pobrecitosnarrative. You know, with due respect to the Statue of Liberty, give me your tired or your poor. Most people feel tired and poor. They're not really out seeking that. Or the third narrative, that being immigrants are our valets. You know, they do the jobs that no one wants. They help us.Immigrants are awesome. Immigrants are joy. Immigrants are life. Immigrants are interesting. They're entrepreneurs. You know, America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. And that's a good thing. And so let's make it that way, as you recently wrote.One of the only silver linings for me of this whole era is that the thing that I wrote about before I met you, before I did Persuaders, was a book about billionaires. And it was very difficult to convince people to care. A lot of liberal and even progressive people were like, “Why are you going after these people? Like, sure, they're not the best, but like, really? These are your enemies? You know, Bill Gates or whoever?”It was actually hard in 2018 when that book came out. It was hard. I was often on the back foot, right? I really had to make a case. People were very, very skeptical of why anyone would say anything negative about the ones who give money away and do all this stuff.It is really different. Seven years later, like everybody gets it. Everybody understands what oligarchs are, you know?Thanks to you.Well, I don't think that's the case. It's thanks to AOC and Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and others. But I wonder whether you think, again, with Elon, the oligarch frame, the warning of oligarchy — is this as salient and helpful with the mass public as we seem to think it is?Having people truly understand that this is a government by the bullies for the billionaires, that concept.I guess just the wrinkle is in a country where still a lot of people kind of want to be billionaires, is it as cool a message as I think it is?Yeah.It is, in fact, the case, as people often report, that in America, no one is poor. They're just pre-rich, right? We're all just temporarily embarrassed. You know, we just haven't made our billions. Oprah hasn't given us the car or whatever she's supposed to give us. So there is still that very, very, very deep kind of yearning and with it an admiration and a cultishness around the extraordinarily wealthy.But wow, are people pissed at the rich. I mean, that may be the only thing that has bipartisan agreement in this country is just how extraordinarily furious people are, because I think the fundamental difference is that in the olden times, this cult of people are rich because they're made out of awesome, because they're uniquely smart, because they're uniquely capable and hardworking and so on. That's largely been punctured. And people understand.So it's not just that they're rich. It's how they're rich, why they're rich. And the fact that the reason that they're rich is because they've stolen from you. It's that connection.Because sure, people can aspire to have their own, you know, whatever their dream is. In my case, an extensive shoe collection. But, you know, you do you.But the notion that the reason why people have so much money is because you don't — that is increasingly salient. And that's really the crux of it.Now, where this gets hard — and this brings us back to the earlier conversation of you can't just articulate the problem for people, although that is absolutely extraordinarily essential — they also have to feel that the articulation of the problem lends itself to something that they can do.And so in the universe in which what people are “supposed to do” is petition their government in some way or another. And I say that broadly, right? So vote, register to vote, get other people to vote, call their member of Congress, ask for policy change.It's extraordinary the degree to which people, even low information, low engagement folks, think the jig is up on that particular theory of change.And so I think we are now in a place in which people need to be directed, their anger and their ire need to be directed into what I am calling the “Mangione without murder” strategy. Without murder. Hear that whole phrase.You really do know how to coin a phrase.Yeah, we don't need to be murdering people. I just want to say on the record here that I'm telling you. Anti-murder. I'm anti-murder, whatever you heard, whatever they told you. Sharp messages, no sharp weapons.That's right.Imagine if we actually had people doing, you know, die-ins where corporate CEOs are. If we actually had people going to the places, it's easy to look up. These motherfuckers are all hypocrites. They all go to church. Why aren't we showing up in the parking lots of their churches? And this could both be MAGA Republicans and CEOs. Singing hymns that are actually about what Jesus preached. When they get out of church, say it to their faces.And so I think that the challenge with the billionaire articulation is not that it is not landing. You are correct in your supposition that it is absolutely landing. It's that it quickly becomes, well, every election is a contest between their billionaires and our billionaires. And so the solution, which presumably has been, well, that's why you should vote for Democrats.I know people are really responding to how clear your advice is. And I think it's making a lot of people feel like they know what to do more clearly than they did before. So thank you. I want to go back to that and compile all of your advice. Let's focus on marching orders for everybody here.People are in agreement with you about how grave this is and how serious it is. People feel incredibly undefended by elected Democrats in general and are not expecting them to change very soon. People are doing things already, like calling Congress, but maybe don't know the third, fourth, and fifth things to do.Can you just give us some very, very, very tangible marching orders?So the first thing I would say is in the preservation of your own mental health and wellbeing. Pick a thing that you care about and can be motivated to stay the course with.For some folks, that's going to be education. For some folks, that's going to be immigrant rights. For some folks, that's going to be policing, whatever. There are so many things happening at once that we can all become like cats with a laser pointer and make ourselves nuts.So you pick the thing. You go as local as possible about that thing. And so if it is education, just take that for instance, then you decide with yourself and a handful of your friends, you have a potluck beforehand, you do you. Do something fun and entertaining and get together beforehand. You look up in the public record when the next school board meeting is in your local community. And you go there and you make statements about ensuring that all children have the freedom to learn the truth of our past, and that all children have the freedom to belong and be who they are within their schools. And you oppose any kind of effort to implement the draconian fascist agenda in your own community.So that is one thing. You can do that within the context of immigrant rights. You can do that in the context of disability justice, racial justice, et cetera.The next piece of advice is to wear your beliefs. Get yourself a “Fabulously Fighting Fascism” t-shirt. One of the things that is most important to the right and to any authoritarian force is to suck our joy, is to suck our uniqueness, is to suck our our being. I say all the time, put up a billboard in the middle of nowhere that shows people across the gender spectrum just having themselves the best possible time, and say “Fabulously fighting fascism.”You will get so much local media and local attention, even if it's in the middle of nowhere because it is a saucy message. Show, not tell that you do not agree with this, that you refuse it.So I think the name of the game is really resistance. refusal, and ridicule. And ridicule is a key and essential element that I have danced around.Join a union, if you can join a union. Support union efforts. That is a place where deep and authentic organizing actually happens and needs to happen much, much more expansively. One of the most important keys to fighting autocracy is a strong, integrated, active, in-your-face labor community.Before we go, to leave people on a note of hope, in a lot of the messaging that you do and the formal proper messages you draft for TV ads or other communication, there's a certain structure, which I wrote about in my book. It's often the beginning and the end where more hope and uplift come in and in the middle is where you explain the obstructions to that promiseA lot of people really can't see the after of this. It's very hard to see anything. I find it very difficult to visualize 2026. I find it very, very difficult to visualize 2035. I could see a scenario where it's totally fine, this thing blew over, it imploded, and my kids are just living a normal life, vaguely remembering this. And I could imagine a scenario in which most people I know don't live in this country anymore. It's so hard to picture the after.Can you help us picture the after in a hopeful way if we get this right, if we do all the things you're talking about?The fact that you can't picture 2026. I can't either. And that is either extraordinarily terrifying or fantastic. The reason why it is potentially fantastic is because it takes a fundamental rupture, a big rupture that we think that we have already had, but we have not — because we are still waking up in the morning and going to the store and answering our telephones and checking our social and getting our kids to school and all the things that, of course, we need to continue to do.That rupture has not happened for most people. And it is only in a fundamental rupture that we get a period — and obviously, the decimation of it is one of the most tragic and horrible things in American history. But Reconstruction wouldn't have happened without the Civil War. The New Deal wouldn't have happened without the decimation of the Gilded Age and God forbid, the Depression.Moments of extraordinary rupture are moments of extraordinary possibility where, as my colleague, Mike Podhorzer points out, pre the Revolution, when people were hanging out in the colonies, and trying, you know, to do the Boston Tea Party and to petition the king, “Hey, yo, like, we're not fond of this. We're not keen.”And I'm not discounting the fact that things were pretty bad for most people and enslavement and no women's rights and so on. I'm not making believe that that period was a beautiful era in American history.The only point that I'm making is that there has to be a rupture so fundamental that people are like, “Oh no, how about we just don't have a king? How about we just don't be a colony anymore? How about we decide that we are going to invent a new country from scratch?”Obviously not really from scratch because of the destruction and usurpation and genocide of Native people — again, I am not trying to say this was like a beautiful era.All I'm trying to say is that in the unknowing, in the what-the-f**k-is-going-to-come-next, is actually where invention comes. And it requires us recognizing that. To give you a tautology, the problem is made out of the problem, as we were discussing at the top of our conversation. To think that a system that is working largely as designed, to bring us representatives who, with notable and noteworthy and laudable exceptions, are not actually serving our interests and are not stepping up to the plate. To think that they would behave any differently is to not understand that the entire progressive movement is begging the master for money to buy tools to take down his house, and it always has been.And because we've continued to limp along in this, “But maybe we'll win this election, but maybe we'll get people to vote, but maybe we'll pass this one little policy,” is not to recognize the fact that actually within U.S. politics, there is no correlation between majority support for a policy and that policy passing. And so we have to stop thinking that tinkering at the edges of the old ways, as we have done, is going to yield a new result.And I don't know if this isn't sounding hopeful, but to me, it is always the case. The most fundamental truth of life is that the future is made out of the decisions that we take collectively.We make the future. What comes next will be decided on the basis of what we do. And that's up to us.Readers like you make The Ink possible and keep it independent. If you haven't already joined us, sign up today for our mailing list, support our work, and help build a free and fearless media future by becoming a paying subscriber. And if you're already a part of our community, thank you! We hope you'll consider giving a subscription to The Ink as a gift. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

FROM THE VAULT: In the 1980s and '90s, the AIDS epidemic devastated communities around the world—yet governments, media, and society largely turned a blind eye. In this episode, we uncover the early days of the crisis, the devastating loss of life, and the fearless activism that forced the world to pay attention. From the rise of organizations like ACT UP to the scientific breakthroughs that changed the course of the epidemic, we explore the human stories behind one of the most tragic and transformative public health crises in history.

Jonny welcomes Heather back with a brief discussion of the Superb Owl, which neither of them watched. They then turn to a brief chronicle of the anti-LGBTQ moves and rhetoric in the government and beyond this past week. In the back half of the show, they share two examples of the consequenses of this political climate before moving on to recommendations for acting up and pushing back, some of them literally from ACT UP.

Rasheed Newson, television writer and producer and author of My Government Means to Kill Me, discusses the fallout from the HIV/AIDS crisis. In conversation with host Cody Sisco, Rasheed talks about the ascendance of sex positivity thanks to PrEP, how his novel imagines a young gay Black man in 1980s New York encountering ACT UP, and the legacy of the Gay Liberation and Civil Rights movements.

Peter Hujar, Gregg Bordowitz and Rotimi Fani-Kayode are three artists whose work reflects in different ways on the Aids crisis that has devastated communities across the world since the 1980s. Hujar, who died from Aids-related pneumonia in 1987, is the subject of a new show at Raven Row in London, the largest to date at a UK gallery. Host Ben Luke takes a tour of the show with its curators, the writer John Douglas Millar, and the artist, master printer and model for some of Hujar's photographs, Gary Schneider. The artist Gregg Bordowitz was a member of The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, founded in New York in the 1980s. Bordowitz has lived with HIV since the late 1980s, and it has fuelled his art and activism ever since, as a new show at Camden Art Centre in London demonstrates. We spoke to him about his life and work. And this episode's Work of the Week is Rotimi Fani-Kayode's Abiku (Born to Die) (1988), a photograph in The 80s: Photographing Britain, a show at Tate Britain in London. Fani-Kayode was a key figure in the UK's burgeoning avant-garde photography scene in the late 1980s, but died in his early 30s in 1989 from complications relating to Aids. We talk to Jasmine Kaur Chohan, co-curator of the Tate Britain show, about the work.Peter Hujar—Eyes Open in the Dark, Raven Row, London, 30 January-6 AprilGregg Bordowitz—There: a Feeling, Camden Art Centre, London, until 23 MarchThe 80s: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain, until 5 MayThe Art Newspaper's book The Year Ahead 2025, an authoritative guide to the year's unmissable art exhibitions, museum openings and significant art events, is still available to buy at theartnewspaper.com for £14.99 or the equivalent in your currency. Buy it here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

durée : 00:28:21 - Les Pieds sur terre - par : Sonia Kronlund, Stéphanie Thomas - Christophe Martet est séropositif depuis 1985. Indigné par les injustices sociales qui touchent les malades du Sida, il milite à Act Up et venge à sa manière les morts du Sida. Solène, elle, s'est jugée humiliée et bafouée par son compagnon. Lorsqu'il l'a quittée, elle a décidé de se venger. - réalisation : François Caunac, Marie Plaçais

In this very special episode, Ell and Mary talk to veteran professor and HIV/AIDS activist Dr Monica Pearl about her experiences with Act Up and the unique and under-studied intricacies of queer friendship. A perfect antidote and/or accompaniment to the festive season when the emphasis is on “family time”. We met Monica at the Sexuality Summer School, a week of workshops, performances and roundtables held each year at the University of Manchester.Enjoying Life of Bi? Support us at: https://www.patreon.com/lifeofbiFind out more about our work: https://www.lifeofbi.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Si Act-Up n'est pas la seule association à lutter contre le VIH, ses membres pionniers ont su créer l'évènement dans les années 90, en imaginant des actions spectaculaires pour briser le tabou du SIDA.   40 ans après la découverte du virus VIH par l'Institut Pasteur, et alors que la maladie a fait plus de 36 millions de morts dans le monde, nous revenons sur les enjeux mémoriels autour de l'épidémie du VIH-SIDA, les traces laissées dans l'espace public et sur la transmission d'une histoire encore marginalisée.SIDA, des vies pour mémoire, un documentaire de Maxime Grember, réalisé par Sophie Janin, produit par Valérie Nivelon. (Rediffusion) Avec les témoignages de :-  Christian de Leusse, fondateur de l'association marseillaise « Mémoires des sexualités »-  Gérard Bénéteau, prêtre au sein de l'Église Saint-Eustache entre 1984 et 2000-  Anne Rousseau Rambach, militante au sein d'Act Up-Paris entre 1991 et 1996, éditrice, romancière et scénariste-  Christophe Broqua, anthropologue, chercheur au CNRS, auteur de la thèse en sociologie « Engagements homosexuels et lutte contre le sida au sein de l'association Act Up-Paris »-  Fred Navarro, président d'Act Up-Paris entre 2012 et 2013. En 2017, le film de Robin Campillo 120 battements par minute marque un tournant dans la manière de représenter l'histoire du SIDA en France, et plus précisément celle d'Act Up-Paris, en apportant une visibilité nouvelle à la lutte qu'ont menée les premiers activistes du SIDA.Dernièrement, de grandes expositions comme celle du Mucem à Marseille en 2022, ou plus récemment celles du Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg ont montré qu'il y avait un besoin d'histoire, une nécessité à y revenir, à raconter ce qu'avait été l'épidémie du VIH-SIDA dans ses années les plus sombres.Mais malgré cette forme de patrimonialisation nouvelle, cette histoire reste encore méconnue du grand public, et finalement assez peu enseignée auprès des nouvelles générations chez qui le virus circule principalement aujourd'hui.Avec le temps, l'enjeu mémoriel autour du VIH-SIDA est devenu un enjeu politique. Que ce soit avec la pose de plaques de rues, la commande de fresques artistiques, ou encore la création du centre d'archives LGBTQI+ à Paris.Pour l'heure, un centre sans soutien réel des pouvoirs publics, ce qui amène bon nombre d'associations de lutte contre le SIDA à déposer de façon morcelée leurs archives sur l'ensemble du territoire français.Plus de 40 ans après les premiers morts du SIDA, les archives sont donc dispersées, les lieux de mémoire invisibilisés et les noms des disparus méconnus. Alors comment raconter cette histoire dont la liste des victimes s'allonge, bien que depuis 1996, les premiers traitements soient apparus et que la séropositivité n'est plus synonyme de condamnation à mort ? Archives :-  « ZAP du 1er novembre 1991 devant la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris ». © Act Up-Paris. Vidéo déposée aux Archives Nationales-  Interview de Christophe Martet, dans « Manifestations de Act Up », FR3 1992. © INA-  Interview de Cleews Vellay, dans « Parlez-moi d'argent », France Inter 1993. © INA. Bibliographie :- « Act Up, Une histoire », de Didier Lestrade (La Découverte, 2022)- « Agir pour ne pas mourir ! Act Up, les homosexuels et le sida », de Christophe Broqua (Presses de Sciences Po, 2005) - « VIH/SIDA, L'épidémie n'est pas finie », catalogue de l'exposition du Mucem, ouvrage collectif. (Anamosa, 2021). Musiques :- Orgue de Saint-Eustache- « It's a sin » des Pet Shop Boys- « Live to Tell » de Madonna- « Toxic » de Britney Spears- « Hideous » d'Oliver Sim. Films :- « 120 battements par minute », (Robin Campillo, 2017)- « Portrait d'une présidente », (Brigitte Tijou, 1995)- « Act Up, Sida Guerilla », (Agence Capa, 1993). Ressources :- The Aids Memorial - Le collectif Archives LGBTQI+ de Paris. Remerciements :- L'association Act Up-Paris : Julien Bruneau- Les Archives Nationales : Lucile Douchin, Vanessa Szollosi et Sandrine Gill- L'École des Beaux-Arts de Paris : Sarah Pépin et Philippe Pucyclo- Gérard Beneteau, Anne Rousseau Rambach, Christophe Broqua, Fred Navarro, Christian de Leusse, Didier Lestrade, Lalla Kowska Régnier, Jean-Luc Armani, Mikael Zenouda, Michel Bourrelly, Clem Hue, Renaud Chantraine, Nicolas Hardy, Pauline Gallinari et Ania Szczepanska. Diaporama

Every year, 1st December is World AIDS day. To mark the occasion, let's look back at the story of the Act Up group. Act Up started causing a buzz in New York in 1987, four years after the AIDS virus had been discovered. The highly organised group met several times a week to discuss their action plan. They demanded more prevention and communication campaigns from the state, better access to care, transparency from pharmaceutical labs and an end to the deportation of undocumented migrants. They used shock tactics to attract the attention of the media. When was this group formed? What kind of campaigns did they use? What are some examples of concessions secured by Act Up? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the latest episodes, click here: Why is 'permacrisis' the new dictionary word of the year? Is it dangerous if I get heart palpitations? Why do we get great ideas in the shower? A Bababam Originals podcast, written and produced by Joseph Chance. First broadcast: 7/12/2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England.  But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England.  But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England.  But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England.  But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England.  But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England.  But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comAnderson doesn't need an introduction, but he's a broadcast journalist who has anchored Anderson Cooper 360° for more than two decades. He's also a correspondent for 60 Minutes and the host of a podcast centered on grief, “All There Is.” He invited me on the pod after the death of my mother this summer, and this Dishcast episode is the extended version of our conversation, which covers my experience of the AIDS crisis and the deaths of my parents and my beagle, Bowie. I was not expecting to talk about my AIDS memories, so forgive me for some choking up.For three clips of our convo — on Anderson losing his brother to suicide, how he coped by seeking out warzones, and coming out of the closet on the Dish — head over to our YouTube page.Other topics: the two of us meeting at the downtown DC YMCA three decades ago; Anderson reading passages from my 1990 piece “Gay Life, Gay Death”'; my best friend Patrick who died of AIDS; my HIV diagnosis in 1993 that derailed my Green Card; my constant fear of deportation; the medieval tortures of AIDS; my photographer friend going blind; the program that paired gay men with patients; the men outed to their parents by AIDS; the deeper closet that black men faced; patients being pariahs among other gays; the partners excluded from hospitals and funerals; the clinical depression I fell into after HIV meds saved my life; my brief thought that God might be evil; how my faith sustained me; survivor's guilt; the survivors who escaped into meth; the happy-sad music of Pet Shop Boys; the AIDS quilt and Roy Cohn; the gallows humor of Diseased Pariah News; the amnesia around the plague; Virtually Normal; throwing myself into the marriage fight; the queer activists who opposed that fight; speaking at churches; ACT-UP's rage; the suffering of Christ; Obergefell; the ordeal of my 10-day silent meditation; Anderson losing his father at age 10 and closing down; his mother's struggle with alcohol; the last time he saw his brother alive; the taboo of talking about death; putting seniors in nursing homes; the decline of religion; Camus; my mom's mental illness; my parents' contentious marriage; their divorce after 49.5 years; losing my dad to a ghastly accident in early Covid; my mom's dementia; her prolonged and agonizing death; the mixed blessing of being so close to her; the heroic sacrifices of my sister; the death of Bowie; the power of venting grief; the powerful act of simply being present with mourners; Anderson's worries about his gay status reporting in dangerous places; a gay photographer killed by a mob in Somalia; and helping Tim Cook out of the closet.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Reihan Salam on the evolution of the GOP, John Gray on the state of liberal democracy, David Greenberg on his new bio of John Lewis, Christine Rosen on humanness in a digital world, and Mary Matalin on anything but politics. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Peter Staley was one of the most prominent members of the AIDS activism group ACT-UP. He is largely credited as one of the pioneers responsible for the creation of life-saving AIDS drugs. He recounts the most harrowing times of the AIDS crisis — and how he persevered.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Send us a textMeg mourns the suicide of New York Ballet City principal dancer Joseph Duell. Jessica returns to the election of 1980 to try to understand how we got here.Please check out our website, follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, and...WRITE US A REVIEW HEREWe'd LOVE to hear from you! Let us know if you have any ideas for stories HEREThank you for listening!Love,Meg and Jessica

Our special guest, writer and activist Sarah Schulman, joins us to discuss the practical realities of building community from her perspective as an activist, community organizer, and artistic mentor! This season, we have explored the ways we can forge friendship and chosen family. One angle we haven't yet examined is the the power of rallying around a shared cause. This, too, is a form of community, and of family. We were honored to speak with Sarah about so many things -- her writing, her time in Act Up, her opinions on group unity and successful advocacy, and her thoughts on today's political climate. We also discuss her artistic achievements: building spaces for queer experimental filmmakers; being a generalist; and the legacy of mentoring younger generations of writers. ----- Follow Amrita & Andrew at emergencycontacts.substack.com ----- The books by Sarah Schulman that we mention in this episode include: Let The Record Show: A Political History of Act Up Conflict is Not Abuse After Delores

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comMichelle is an opinion columnist at the New York Times, and before that she was a columnist for Slate. She has written three books: Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, The Means of Reproduction, and The Goddess Pose. She's also an on-air contributor at MSNBC.For two clips of our convo — debating who the real Kamala is, and how much BLM is responsible for lost black lives — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: growing up in Buffalo with conservative parents; her dad a journalist and mom a math teacher; Michelle a teen activist in the “Buffalo abortion wars”; the legality but ugliness of clinic protests; a pro-life man knocking the wind out of her; ACT UP; going to J-school; reporting at mega-churches in Ohio in the 2004 election; Harris' moderate Smart on Crime book in 2009; her “triangulating” in 2019 (e.g. fracking); her busing moment with Biden; supporting a bail fund in summer 2020; Biden's bait-and-switch as a centrist; bipartisan support for Israel; Merrick Garland's effort to appear apolitical; lawfare; from Bush's “f**k yeah” patriotism to Trump's dark view of America; the Iraq War and 2008 bailout causing mistrust toward institutions; crumbling infrastructure; Trump never being a majority candidate; the cultural grievance fueling him; Michelle going to Trump rallies; the 1619 Project; debating the US as a “white supremacy”; the left radicalizing after Trump replaced a two-term black president; Covid mania; the distortion of Twitter; the Electoral College and its roots; the violent crime spike in 2020 and after; how the disadvantaged always bear the brunt of disorder; the greed of BLM Inc; the press distortion of unarmed black men killed by police; Michelle's 2014 piece “What Is a Woman?”; Rachel Levine; puberty blockers; the Dutch protocol; the Cass Review; bathroom bills; and the GLAAD protest against the NYT.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: David Frum on Trump, Musa al-Gharbi on wokeness, Walter Kirn on Republican voters, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal welfare, Mary Matalin on life, Anderson Cooper on grief, John Gray on, well, everything, and Sam Harris for our quadrennial chat before Election Day. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

09/02/24: InForum columnist, Jim Shaw, is filling in for Joel Heitkamp on KFGO, and is joined in the studio by two performers from an upcoming Act Up Theatre show. Craig Ellingson and Angie Schulz talk about the upcoming musical, “Falsettos.”  It's a provocative show dealing with life in the LGBTQ community, being Jewish, and the start of the AIDS epidemic. Get your tickets and learn more about Act Up Theatre here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week we're excited to present a conversation with Red Island director Robin Campillo from the 2024 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Rendez-Vous and NYFF veteran Robin Campillo, whose 2017 period drama BPM: Beats Per Minute reconstructed and celebrated ACT UP's legacy of AIDS activism in France during the 1990s, once again draws on personal history with his latest film, reaching back further to evoke a sumptuously visualized 1970s childhood spent with his military family on Madagascar. Growing up on one of the last remaining French colonial bases on the island, young Thomas (Charlie Vauselle) keeps a curious and observant eye on the adults around him, not least his parents (Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Quim Guterriez). Bonding with young Suzanne (Cathy Pham) over the Fantômette comic books, Thomas's imagination and observational powers grow even as the world around him is about to die. Making striking use of a child's perspective, Campillo's carefully observed drama of a lost world is lyrical and clear-eyed in equal measure. This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

Get my training and advanced episodes: https://www.patreon.com/listeningtime US Conversations: https://www.patreon.com/USConversations Transcript: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OXfjQXPdUrpese46ttPYm46LjVHLvTVS/view?usp=sharing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wanna chat about the episode? Or just hang out? Come join us on discord!   --- Time isn't the only thing the FDA is killing. - ACT UP slogan   Chris & Kayla grapple with the intense nuance presented by the Church of Perpetual Life and the Life Extension Foundation. --- *Search Categories* Anthropological; Science / Pseudoscience; Common interest / Fandom   --- *Topic Spoiler* Bill Faloon, The Church of Perpetual Life, and the FDA   --- Further Reading https://www.churchofperpetuallife.org/ https://www.youtube.com/@COPL18/featured https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Faloon https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/1999/1/fda-standing-in-the-way-of-progress https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/theyre-gonna-live-forever-6363863 https://www.actuporalhistory.org/actions/seize-control-of-the-fda https://www.archivebuttons.com/articles?article=https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/before-occupy-how-aids-activists-seized-control-of-the-fda-in-1988/249302/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_UP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_freedom_movement --- *Patreon Credits* Michaela Evans, Heather Aunspach, Alyssa Ottum, David Whiteside, Jade A, amy sarah marshall, Martina Dobson, Eillie Anzilotti, Lewis Brown, Kelly Smith Upton, Wild Hunt Alex, Niklas Brock, Jim Fingal Jenny Lamb, Matthew Walden, Rebecca Kirsch, Pam Westergard, Ryan Quinn, Paul Sweeney, Erin Bratu, Liz T, Lianne Cole, Samantha Bayliff, Katie Larimer, Fio H, Jessica Senk, Proper Gander, Nancy Carlson, Carly Westergard-Dobson, banana, Megan Blackburn, Instantly Joy, Athena of CaveSystem, John Grelish, Rose Kerchinske, Annika Ramen, Alicia Smith, Kevin, Velm, Dan Malmud, tiny, Dom, Tribe Label - Panda - Austin, Noelle Hoover, Tesa Hamilton, Nicole Carter, Paige, Brian Lancaster, tiny, GD, Elloe

Margaret finishes talking with Francesca Fiorentini about the AIDS activists who changed the world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Margaret talks with Francesca Fiorentini about the AIDS activists who changed the world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.