Show Notes
Ralph welcomes Wes Bryant, a retired Air Force special operations master sergeant and former analyst at the Civilian Protection Center who talks to us about how civilians, either through incompetence or negligence, are not being protected during American missile strikes. Then our resident constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, joins us to break down his latest op-ed “The Power to Declare War Belongs to Congress Alone.”
Wes Bryant is a defense and national security analyst with focus on foreign policy and global conflict, counterterrorism and extremism, strike and joint targeting operations, and civilian harm. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 at the rank of Master Sergeant after twenty years of active duty service. He was formerly a senior policy analyst and advisor on precision warfare and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where he led as the first-ever Branch Chief of Civilian Harm Assessments. This strike [on the girls’ school in Minab, Iran] violated standing practices and doctrine we’ve had in place for two, three decades. That’s aside from even the work we were doing at the Pentagon in civilian harm mitigation to get better at this sort of thing and prevent these things from happening…This is just one of many. My colleagues at Airwars who track civilian harm incidents in conflict zones—right now, they’re tracking over 130 separate incidents throughout Iran (that’s between the U.S. and Israel) and that number is going to spike. And of course we’re tracking, I believe, it’s over 2,000 civilian casualties. That number is surely going to spike once the smoke clears. Wes Bryant
I believe that right now, with the way we are conducting ourselves as a nation on the international stage—and most importantly, the way we’re using or abusing our military and the use of lethal military force—we are carrying out state terrorism. Israel assuredly has been for years. Wes Bryant
We hear all these people (especially Hegseth most recently) talking about “precision” —”precision strikes” and “no one’s more precise” and “precision warfare”. Well, I was an expert in precision warfare. I was one of the people helping develop our standards for precision warfare and try to make us get to the point where we’re actually carrying out precision warfare consistently. Precision warfare really means the minimal use of resources, the minimal use of (as Hegseth says) lethality in order to accomplish strategic objectives—and the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure. We have in Gaza simply the use of precision weapons to decimate an entire urban infrastructure and decimate parts of the population. So what I say is (and not flippantly, unfortunately, I say it somberly) the only thing being applied here in terms of precision is that civilians and civilian infrastructure are being killed and destroyed more precisely. Wes Bryant
Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall. When we decided in the culture that we would rather be an empire that got an adrenaline high from being a colossus and surrendering our republican virtues of rule of law, everyone gets to march to their own drummer, find fulfillment as long as they’re not harming anyone else, you then find this repeated disrespect for the Declare War Clause. Bruce Fein
News 3/27/26 * Our top stories this week have to do with the tiny, blockaded island nation of Cuba. Cuba, famous for its medical innovations including a lung cancer vaccine, has long maintained medical missions abroad. In recent days, the United States has pressured foreign governments to end these partnerships, including passing a law that opens up the possibility of sanctions on countries that accept these medical missions. Thi
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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