Friday is Loud & Clear’s weekly hour-long segment The Week in Review, about the week in politics, policy, and international affairs. Today they focus on the ongoing protest movement sweeping the country, the victories against racist monuments and memorials, divisions between the White House and the military, and more.
Confirmed cases of Covid-19 are skyrocketing in a dozen states, mostly in the Deep South and the Midwest as governors insist that their states reopen. In those 12 states, confirmed cases are up more than 50 percent over what they were two weeks ago. Only Utah’s governor announced that the state would delay its reopening to deal with the new cases. Four of those states - North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada - are now seeing a record number of new coronavirus cases. Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician and vice-chair of the Infectious Disease Society of America’s Global Health Committee, joins the show with John.
Large-scale peaceful protests continued across the country this week, and there are plans for more over the weekend. Protesters in Seattle took control of a local police precinct and began handing out free food and water. And statues commemorating Confederate leaders continue to be toppled. Meanwhile, President Trump announced yesterday that the Republican National Convention would be moved to Jacksonville after the governor of North Carolina would not allow delegates to attend without wearing masks. Even more controversially, the White House announced that the President’s first post-COVID-19 campaign rally would be held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of the worst anti-black massacre in the country’s history. And that rally will be held on June 19th, also known as Juneteenth, the day on which the entrance of Union troops into the last bastion of slavery is commemorated. Brian speaks with Estevan Hernandez, an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition who has been in the streets helping to organize recent protests.
Eleanor Goldfield has just completed a long-form documentary that is unlike anything that’s been done on the issue of fracking and the environment in West Virginia. Hard Road of Hope introduces you to the people of West Virginia and shows you the toll that more than a century of coal mining and fracking has taken on the land and the people of that beautiful state. The film was just selected by the Rome Independent Prisma Awards. Creative activist and journalist Eleanor Goldfield, host of the podcast Act Out!, which airs on Free Speech TV, whose work is at ArtKillingApathy.com, and who is the writer, director, and producer of Hard Road of Hope joins the show with Brian.
It’s Friday! So it’s time for the week’s worst and most misleading headlines. John speaks with Steve Patt, an independent journalist whose critiques of the mainstream media have been a feature of his site Left I on the News and on twitter @leftiblog and Sputnik producer Nicole Roussell.
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