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“Be Bold America!” Live Interview

Aired Friday, July 3, 2026 at 5:00pm (PT)

Times have changed! 45% of today's voters identify as political independents. They are rejecting rigid opinions. Now, there is a non-partisan reform organization who are advancing fair participation for independent-minded voters.

The Independent Voter Project (IVP) is focused on three reforms:

• Open primaries for every voter! Over 26 million Americans are locked out of primary elections simply because they refuse to join a political party. The independent Voter Project is leading the fight to change that.

• Improve better representation with More Choice Voting! When elections offer only two viable choices; voters settle. More Choice Voting advances reforms that expand the field, increase competition, and force candidates to earn broader support.

• End Super PACs! 74.9% of Maine voters said yes to capping Super PAC donations at $5000. Now, IVP is defending that law in court – and building the legal framework to take the fight to all 50 states.

IVP’s legal work is the engine behind every reform they pursue. They author legislation, build the constitutional framework, and defend it in court. Their track record isn't theoretical – it's precedent. IVP’s litigation record, spans, offense and defense – from federal district courts to the US Supreme Court.

Interview Guest:

S. Chad Peace is an attorney, media executive, and election reform advocate based in San Diego. He is the founder of IVC Media, a digital strategy and public affairs firm working with corporate, nonprofit, and political clients, and a partner at Peace & Shea LLP, where his legal work focuses on election law and voter participation. Chad has been involved in national and state efforts to expand access for independent voters, including litigation, ballot initiatives, and public education. He is a frequent commentator on election reform and political systems and co-hosts the Independent Voter Podcast. View Chad Peace's interview on ABC News!

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"Be Bold America!" Live Interview Aired / June 19, 2026

The Global Crackdown on Free Expression

in Honor of Project Censored's 50th Anniversary

In this interview, on the global crackdown of free expression, Dr. Steve Macek from North Central College in Illinois will discuss his work to combat the growing attacks on free speech and academic freedom in the U.S. and around the world.

Over the past decade, free speech and academic freedom have faced a synchronized, global decline. This erosion is not limited to traditional autocracies; it has increasingly taken root within established liberal democracies – most notably, right here in the United States.

The threats manifest in two primary ways: external political and legal coercion (from governments and lawmakers) and internal culture pressures (leading to self-censorship and polarization).

Tune in to “Be Bold America!” on Friday, June 19 at 5:00pm to learn how restrictions on free expression mirrors a country’s broader shift toward authoritarian governance.

Interview Guest:

Dr. Steve Macek is a professor of communication and chair of the department of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois. He teaches courses on the First Amendment, journalism history, media policy, media, criticism, and urban studies.

Dr. Macek is the author of Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City, that is a critical analysis of media discourse about American cities. His ads, commentaries and articles on censorship, academic freedom, media regulation and politics have been published in a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and websites

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"Sexism is something that exists because it has existed, does exist, and therefore feels inevitable that it will exist. Certain treatments of women and girls are rooted in inequity simply because those bodies are female. Sexism over time and across institutions sends repeated messages about who women are and where they belong, and constructs a palatable version of womanhood that is non-threatening." - Allison T. Butler

In Allison T. Butler's new book, The Judgement of Gender, Allison examines how women are both centered and silenced, and maligned in popular culture. She explores a generational legacy in which media harms women, and unpacks what it means when women are cast as “problematic.”

Allison uses grounded and critical media literacy to look at celebrity stories, and those thrust into the spotlight, with more nuance, including the infamously sensationalized coverage of Britney Spears, Anita Hill, and Monica Lewinsky.

Interview Guest:

Allison Butler is a Senior Lecturer, Associate Chair, and the Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches courses on critical media literacy and representations of education in the media. Allison serves as the Vice President on the Media Freedom Foundation and co-run Mass Media Literacy, a grassroots organization that builds curriculum and trains teachers in critical media literacy across K-12 schools. She is the author of numerous articles and books on media literacy and is co-author of multiple practical resources for media literacy education. In addition, Allison previous book The Media and Me was the subject of her previous "Be Bold America!" interview on media literacy, visit: The Media and Me: A Guide to Media Literacy.

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"Be Bold America! ~ Aired May 15, 2026

With the 2026 midterm elections looming and democracy on the line, progressive attorney, activist, and author, Gary Lucks, presents in his new book We Are The People fiercely practical, street-level directions for Americans who want to engage beyond posting, protesting, or donating, to actually helping flip the House and Senate this November.

Drawing on postmortem data from Activate America, Lucks shows that grassroots volunteers shifted outcomes by 2-4% in battleground districts in 2024 and that Democrats need to flip just three seats in the House and four in the Senate to restore a legislative firewall against the current administration's agenda. Unlike many tomes on the current political situation, We Are the Power tells readers exactly how to close that gap.

Gary Lucks, JD, CPEA, is a progressive author, activist, and environmental attorney who has spent four decades at the intersection of law, policy, and sustainability. He is the founder of Progressive Action East Bay and Resistance Action East Bay Indivisible, two of California's most active grassroots political networks. Lucks is also the author of You Are Not Alone: Your Roadmap to Effective Political Action. More at garylucks.com.

Top Three Resources Shared in Podcast to Defend Democracy:

1) Hopium Chronicles (sign up for free)

2) Indivisible (look for a chapter near you)

3) Activate America (volunteer)

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The American Dream at its best is an ethical ideal and a moral compass. If respected and sustained, it can guide the United States through Trump 2.0. Anchored in the US Constitution, Saving the American Dream features meditations for dark times. Meditations are intentional acts of focused attention. They seek insight—a clear and deep understanding—about critical issues.

What, for example, is most important for the United States today? Are we Americans doing the best we can? How may inquiry about the American Dream advance the reflection and action needed now to support and defend the Constitution of the United States?

Saving the American Dream is a journey that goes where such questions

lead. Its fundamental premise is that individuals moved to communal action by warned awareness and committed resistance are indispensable to meet challenges that grow by the day. Guidance from reliable American writers—philosophers, historians, novelists, poets, essayists, religious thinkers—maps the way.”

Interview Guest:

John Roth, is the Edward J. Sexton professor emeritus of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. Dr. Roth was named the 1988 U. S. National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Dr. Roth's expertise in Holocaust and genocide studies, as well as in philosophy, ethics, American studies, and religious studies, has been advanced by postdoctoral appointments as a Graves Fellow in the Humanities, a Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and a Fellow of the National Humanities Institute, Yale University.

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“Be Bold America!” Aired April 17, 2026 at 5:00pm (PT)

Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston stated in his bestselling book, The Making of Donald Trump, when Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower lobby escalator live on national television in June 2015 to announce his campaign for president, nearly every journalist treated his candidacy as a vanity project.

Having covered Donald Trump intensely from 1988 through 1995 and following him ever since, David knew his dramatic entry on live national television indicated Donald Trump was serious. He also knew that his presidential run would not be for the benefit of the United States of America, but only for Donald Trump

As the Financial Times wrote of Johnston’s book, “[It] gives Trump the thorough scrubbing, he deserves… He makes a compelling case that Trump has the attributes of both “dictator” and “deceiver.”

Interview Guest:

David Cay Johnston is one of America’s most award-winning investigative journalists with a long career reporting for the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the New York Times, where his work was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Johnston is a journalist and author with a specialty in economics and tax issues. Johnston is the author of several bestselling books and teaches at Syracuse University College of Law. Of local note, David Cay Johnston graduated from Soquel High School and considers Santa Cruz County the best place in the world to live.

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"Why the Climate Fight is Failing. Radical Activism is Needed!"

“Be Bold America!” Aired April 3 2026 at 5:00pm (PT)

The climate rallying cries to “Save the Planet” no longer work in our hyper-partisan world, nor do images of polar bears on melting glaciers. The problem isn't scientific, fact-based, or even technological.

The problem is political, emotional, and ideological. Hackman provides a path forward for engagement and voter mobilization that combats apathy, dread, and resentment, and builds greater issue identification.

Conservation and climate advocacy expert, Will Hackman, in his book Radically Reframing Climate Change: A Guide to Saving Ourselves reframes the climate crisis as a humanity crisis, arguing that we must change how we think and talk about climate change, both in our conversations with non-believers and among those who care.

Assuring humanity's place on a changing planet will require a near universal level of public support we will never reach if we keep making the same mistakes. We know how to do this. But the stakes have never been higher and time is running out.

Interview Guest:

Since 2013, Will Hackman has served as a senior strategist in conservation advocacy efforts and has helped to advance public policies related to ocean and land conservation as well as clean energy and the environment. Among his many efforts, Will spent years defending Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from industrial logging—the United States’ largest national forest and one of the world’s largest temperate rainforests.

Hackman also worked with local and indigenous communities across the western United States on conservation of public lands and rivers, helped strengthen fuel-efficiency regulations for cars and trucks, helped pass major bipartisan legislation to combat illegal fishing, and engaged in international marine fisheries conservation efforts around the world. Will is a contributing author on energy, environmental, and climate change topics for print, podcasts, and online media. in his 2022 TEDx talk, “The Future of Climate Change is Personal”, Will challenges us to reframe our climate conversations to overcome polarization and partisanship.

CoHost:

Mike Clancy, is a climate expert who serves on the “Question Review Team” for the Annual Leon Panetta Lecture Series. He is the former Scientific and Technical Director of the Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center in Monterey, and a recipient of the Navy’s highest civilian award, the Distinguished Civilian Service Award. And, if that wasn’t enough, he played a supporting role in the movie, “A Long Road to Tao”.

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“Be Bold America!”

Aired March 6, 2026 at 5:00pm (PT)

“America presents an egregious paradox – it has both the most expensive healthcare and the shortest life expectancy in the West." - Robert Sapolsky

Living in the United States today means surviving in a society where the social fabric has been ravaged.

How healthy you are is dependent on where you live. Americans suffer, more cancers, heart disease, mental illness, and chronic diseases than those who live in other wealthy nations, despite having the most expensive healthcare system in the world.

Why?

This Interview will embark on a journey to unravel the profound impact of public policies on American health from before birth in the book

"Born Sick in the USA" by Stephen Bezruchka, PhD.

Delve into the intricate web where economic inequality weaves a tapestry of sickness stemming from a highly stressed society.

Interview Guest:

Stephen Bezruchka, M.D., M.P.H. is Associate Teaching Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Health Systems & Population Health and of Global Health at the School of Public Health, University of Washington. At UW he received the 2002 Outstanding Teacher Award, the 2008 Faculty Community Service Award, the 2017 Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, and the 2018 Communicating Public Health to the Public Award.

Dr. Stephen Bezruchka is a returning guest. His previous interview was on his book, Inequality Kills Us All, and was one of the most listened to "Be Bold America!" podcasts.

Dr. Bezruchka serves on the board of the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, whose parent organization has shared two Nobel Peace Prizes. There he developed the Economic Inequity Health Task Force. He launched the Population Health Forum in 1998, which presents many of the ideas in this book. His previous books include The Pocket Doctor: A Passport to Healthy Travel; A Guide to Trekking in Nepal, with the 8th edition appearing in 2011; Nepali for Trekkers; and Altitude Illness: Prevention & Treatment. These books have been translated into other languages.

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