Show Notes
Ralph welcomes Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson to discuss a wide range of topics, including NATO, Greenland, Gaza, and more. Then, Ralph speaks to Rabbi Alissa Wise (founding director of Rabbis for Ceasefire) about the “Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza" campaign. Finally, Ralph and the team address some current events. Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Over his 31 years of service, Colonel Wilkerson served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff from 2002 to 2005, and Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. Colonel Wilkerson also served as Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia, and for fifteen years he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All-Volunteer Force Forum. You aren't a newspaper, not really, if you don't have the guts to go out and get the news wherever it's happening. And you're reporting, nonetheless, to the American people [on the truth]. And it's nothing about the truth. It's as bad as what Netanyahu does in his own country in Hebrew. It's propaganda. And in many cases, it's not even accurate propaganda. It's falsified propaganda. You know, there used to be a law. And the law prohibited anyone in the Defense Department, for example, but any of the government agencies (Defense Department was the most guilty) that said: you cannot propagandize the American people. You can propagandize foreign audiences—even in wartime, you can propagandize those audiences, but you must not propagandize the American people. You have to tell them the truth or tell nothing at all. And if you're a media outlet, you should be telling them the truth, or the truth as you best can determine it. We don't honor that law anymore.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonI think [NATO and the EU are] gone, but I think the prospect for the future ought to be that we replace them. We don't just let them go and not have a replacement. And the replacement should be a European security architecture, which includes the Russians. And last time I checked a Rand McNally map, Russia (at least from the Urals inward) was a part of Europe. And it needs to be based not on spheres of influence, but on economic and financial and other needs that all of that group of people have. That's how you create something that will keep Europe and Russia together and not at loggerheads.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonI've said this a number of times (publicly I've said it) —the January 6th attempt to overthrow the United States government in favor of Donald Trump didn't fail because the system held. It failed because the coup plotters were incompetent, and their incompetence was most visible in not having the military (or a sizable segment thereof). They will not do that again.Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
Rabbi Alissa Wise is the Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, which she founded in October 2023. She was a staff leader at Jewish Voice for Peace from 2011-2021 and co-founded the JVP Rabbinical Council in 2010. She is co-author of “Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing”. She is also one of the organizers of the “Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza” campaign.
I think there is a lot of support in the Jewish community for living up to core liberatory values that there are within Jewish tradition. This is true in every religious tradition and it's true in Judaism, where you can open the sacred text and find a justification for oppression or you could open a sacred text and find a pathway to liberation. And so what we're inviting people into is to pull the thread of liberatory Judaism. And making the conscious choice that those are the threads of the tradition that we want to pull
More from Ralph Nader Radio Hour
Ralph speaks to Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen about how the Trump Administration's drug pricing deals favor Big Pharma. Then, some advice for progressive candidates from Ralph and former NYC Public Advocate Mark Green.
Ralph welcomes Dr. Alison Galvani, the founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, and co-author of the forthcoming article, “Projected Economic Gains and Lives Saved Under Universal Health Care in the United States.” Then our constitutional law expert, Bruce Fein, stops by to tell us about a letter he and Ralph sent to states Attorneys General urging them to prosecute Donald Trump for exhorting his followers to commit voter fraud in the forthcoming midterm congressional elections. Finally, we respond to your feedback on how to be a smart voter. Alison Galvani is the founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis and the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine. She has applied her modelling and health economics skills to address public health challenges including HIV/AIDS, Zika, Ebola, influenza, and COVID-19. And she is co-author of the forthcoming article “Projected economic gains and lives saved under universal healthcare in the United States.” We analyze the American healthcare system as a national balance sheet. And on one side of the ledger, we have: covering the uninsured and expanding care for the uninsured (that costs money). And we took into account that utilization will increase for people that currently have inadequate health care… And when we initially started looking at this in 2019…I anticipated a hefty price tag as well. Our work has focused on the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of public health policy in the US and around the world, and usually we’re asking: How much will it cost to save lives? And we rarely get a no-brainer where you save money and you’re saving lives. Alison Galvani
Ralph speaks to Dr. Feroze Sidhwa for an update on the death toll in Gaza as well as the new documentary film “American Doctor.” Then Ralph and economic William Lazonick discuss Nvidia’s planned $235 billion stock buyback. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon in California. He is also a humanitarian surgeon who has worked in Palestine, Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso. He most recently volunteered at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Gaza. He was blocked from entering Gaza by Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service in November 2025. His work in Gaza is featured in the new documentary film American Doctor. If I’m remembering the exact time right, March of 2016 was the deadliest month for children that [Airwars] had ever studied anywhere—so that’s the 31 days of March of 2016. In the first 25 days of the US-Israeli assault on Gaza, the rate of killing of children was 71 to 142 times higher than in the deadliest month they had ever studied for children anywhere else. And just to put these numbers in a little bit of perspective…If you look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine versus Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Russian forces killed the same percentage of children in Ukraine in 10 months as the US and Israel kill in Gaza every 18 to 37 hours. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Ralph welcomes Mary Berry the daughter of the late American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer, Wendell Berry. Ms. Berry runs the non-profit Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, which serves as a repository for the study of small farm agriculture and preserves the legacy of her family’s work. Then, with the midterms on the horizon, Ralph and the team talk about how to be a smart voter. Plus, Ralph has some choice words for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s so-called “Free Enterprise Express.” Leave a comment about how you are a smart voter. We will collect these and discuss them on our next program. Click the button below to get Professor Laura Nader’s book Controlling Processes.
Ralph welcomes “New York Times” reporter Natasha Singer to discuss her new book, “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools.” Then, Ralph talks about Donald Trump’s midterm convention speeches and the latest impeachment drive with Constitutional law expert Bruce Fein. Natasha Singer is a New York Times reporter covering the intersection of technology, business and education. She has covered tech industry influence in schools for the New York Times for more than a decade, and her school tech reporting helped prompt California to enact a landmark student online data protection law. In 2019, she was part of a Times team whose tech coverage won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting. She is also the author of the book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools. It’s not about the companies immediately making money off schools. It’s about influencing kids, getting customers early and for life. But I think more importantly, it’s about imprinting Silicon Valley worldviews and values on young people. So that you get docile consumers who maybe aren’t worried about wholesale surveillance and data gathering, and docile employees who are not going to push back against being surveilled by their employer or using AI tools or having AI replace them. And so I think this story about tech companies capturing the classroom is not just about how they’re shaping learning. It’s about how some of the most powerful, wealthiest corporations on the planet are able to influence school systems. Natasha Singer