Episode 1006 Part 1! We watched 17 hours of Fulton Country Superior Court so you don't have to! Cohabitating lawyers Matt and Casey are here to break down many of the legal issues, from the mundane to the outright bizarre. These hearings were truly extraordinary. Some of the craziest courtroom drama to ever happen in the real world.
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In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.
In American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15(FSG, 2023), the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner--the American Kalashnikov--as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle's popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore America's gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary America's love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry.
Cameron McWhirter is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in Atlanta. He has covered mass shootings, violent protests and natural disasters across the South. He is also the author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Previously, he reported for other publications in the U.S., as well as Bosnia, Iraq, and Ethiopia.
Zusha Elinson is a national reporter, writing about guns and violence for the Wall Street Journal. Based in California, he has also written for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times Bay Area section.
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907 (Utah State University Press, 2023) recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of active rhetorical practices of assimilation resistance in colonized spaces.
Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty.
By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially to those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.
We're talking about international outrage over the death of a Russian opposition leader, and who is promising to continue his legacy?
Also, we'll explain former President Trump's big legal loss that threatens his fortune and future in business.
Plus, a groundbreaking new cancer therapy; a deal that could create the single-biggest American credit card firm; and the movies, shows, and stars who made waves at the People's Choice Awards.
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Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers signed new legislative maps into law on Monday, and broke a Republican gerrymander that has shaped the state’s politics for years. That means Democrats are pretty much set to gain seats in the state Assembly and state Senate this November. John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, explains what Wisconsin’s win means for the state and the nation.
Alexei Navalny, the head of Russia’s political opposition, died last Friday while serving over 30 years in an Arctic Penal Colony. That means that with less than a month before the country’s next presidential election, the party opposing Vladimir Putin’s regime has lost its most visible leader. It’s not clear how Navalny died, but his widow Yulia accused Putin himself of killing her husband.
And in headlines: Donald Trump is selling $400 sneakers while facing a $450 million fine in his New York fraud trial, the U.N’s highest court started hearing arguments on the legality of Israel’s 57-year occupation of Palestinian territories, and the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are “children.”
Show Notes:
National Democratic Redistricting Committee: “2023-2024 Priority States” – https://democraticredistricting.com/priority-states/
PIX11: “NYPD Dance Team performs” – https://pix11.com/news/morning/nypd-dance-team-performs-on-pix11/
What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast
Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/
For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday
When it became increasingly clear that the federal government was not going to stop the flow of illegal aliens across the border, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began taking strategic action.
“You look at the results, and they speak for themselves,” Brent Smith says of what Abbott has done to slow the flood of illegal crossings.
Smith serves as the county attorney for Kinney County, Texas, which borders Mexico and is about 130 miles west of San Antonio.Because of the enormous influx of illegal aliens crossing the border, Smith says, “Everything has changed” in his community.
“People now, when you hear a helicopter flying in the air, kids know to run home,” Smith said. “And if you hear sirens, 99% of the time, it has to do with illegal immigration.”
Even schools have "military barriers around them" to prevent smugglers from driving through the campus, he added.
The county attorney also said his workload has multiplied many times over as frequent arrests of illegal aliens are made in the county.
According to Smith, “preventing the entry, repelling them at the river” is the way to address the crisis. That's what Abbott has done in Eagle Pass, Texas, at Shelby Park.
Under Abbott’s leadership, the Texas National Guard is preventing the Border Patrol from processing illegal aliens in Shelby Park, which is on the Rio Grande and which served as a popular crossing point until Texas assumed control of it.
The Texas National Guard has laid concertina wire fencing along the riverbank and built a 4,500-foot border wall using shipping containers topped with sharp razor wire to repel illegal crossings.
Because crossings into Shelby Park have fallen to almost none, Smith says, Abbott will likely “expand the tactic that he's using in Shelby Park to other places.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been critical of Abbott’s recent tactics and has previously taken legal action against the governor's efforts to secure the border.
Smith joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain the ongoing legal tensions between Texas and the federal government, and what could be next as the border crisis continues to unfold.
Felix Salmon sits down with Carrie Sun, whose book Private Equity: A Memoirrecalls her life as the right-hand woman of a billionaire hedge fund manager. Burnt out on corporate life, Carrie wanted a low-key day job while she pursued her writing career. Instead, she found herself in a world of high-octane Wall Street hustle where profit is paramount. She and Felix discuss Wall Street culture,
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Podcast production by Jared Downing and Cheyna Roth.
