It was a spring morning in 2016 and there was an omen on my path to make this interview with Robert McChesney and John Nichols, at Hotel Deluxe in Portland, Oregon. They agreed to an interview if I could meet them on their way out the door, in the lobby.
I woke up in the morning to a landslide that blocked my usual route to St. Helen’s Highway, to downtown early to set up the gear. I made it to a road block and had to reverse course and take the high road to drop down Burnside. The scheduling was already tight, I was setting up my recording equipment in the car.
I walked into the hotel with my microphones and recorder hot and rolling. I start this interview out of breath and anxious.
This kind of foreshadowed the reality that was to manifest by the fall of that year: Donald Trump would win a landslide of electoral votes, forcing the left to double back and find a new strategy to reform the dangerously teetering American project.
The event is also allegorical to the subject of the book, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy, as we are going down a path that will be obstructed sooner or later, and we may have to start a recourse before we know its coming.
I am proud of this interview and grateful that these guys, who are well known authors and progressive figures, would join me on my little podcast. I never read the book, they didn’t offer a copy. But it’s probably a good read.
At the time of this interview, the podcast was called Horizon at End Times, but it was published by THRU Media. Intro music courtesy of New Amsterdam Records, composed by Qasim Naqvi.