MARC STEINER [FIELD]:  This place has changed so much. Wow. When we were kids, this is where the Black and Jewish world met, right here. Oh, because Jewish was this side, Jewish and then Baltimore’s 125th Street was Pennsylvania Avenue, and that was down that way. So, that’s where it all… wow.

MICHAEL FOX:  Late last summer when I was in Baltimore, you and I went over to Mondawmin Mall.

MARC STEINER:  That’s right.

MICHAEL FOX:  And you told me the story of your first political activism.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  All right. And if you could just set us up, where are we right now?

MARC STEINER [FIELD]:  We’re at the Mondawmin Mall on the Westside of Baltimore, and it looks really different than it did when I was a kid. It’s just all… they’ve redone the whole outside, probably inside as well. But this was a predominantly white mall, and we used to shop here. 

And my mom and I came down here, it was 1960, and we went down — I forget what we were shopping for, whatever we came for — And so we were there, and we’re looking over the railing. And as we looked over the railing, there [was this] line of Black college students, turned out to be Black college students, picketing the White Coffee Pot — Which was an appropriate name because it was segregated. They had restaurants all across the city.

So, I asked my mom — I was 13, not quite 14 — I asked my mom, could I join the picket line? And she said, in her English accent, all right, my dear, go ask the picket captain and see what he says. So we went downstairs and they said, sure. And that’s the first day I marched.

And so from that moment on, I was in the Civil Rights Movement, and then a couple years later I became the youngest person to be arrested in civil rights in Maryland. In Cambridge, Maryland, not Baltimore, but in Cambridge, which was like, we used to call that Maryland’s Mississippi, Eastern Shore, which is [where] one of the last lynchings in America took place, on the Eastern Shore. And so that was what opened up this world for me.

And I would say from 11 years old to like 17 when I was expelled from high school, my world was different. It was segregated, but my world was Black because of Boy Scouts, the street corner, the all-Black frat. It was middle-class Black guys. So, that was my world. 

And in Baltimore, people forget Baltimore is a Southern city. It’s a mixture of the industrial North with the immigrants coming from all across Europe and later from Latin America that was later from all across Europe, and it’s a Southern city. It’s a deeply segregated town. It’s still very divided. There are very few interracial neighborhoods in Baltimore, even to this day. Most neighborhoods are mostly Black or they’re white or they’re Latino.

MICHAEL FOX:  This is The Battle for Free Speech, a multipart narrative podcast series brought to you by The Real News. I’m Michael Fox, and today we’re going to spend the entire hour speaking with my co-host, Marc Steiner.

First, let me say that if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you will notice that he’s been absent lately. Unfortunately, he’s been dealing with some health issues and he had to take a step back. That is all the more reason why I’m so excited to get to speak with him today for the entire hour.

And let me just put this into context. In this podcast, we’ve looked at the attacks on free speech rights today in the United States. We looked at the history and how movements and organizations have stood up and used free speech in their work. We looked at how social media, AI, and disinformation are undermining our free speech and how people are responding in the United States and abroad.

In this final episode of the series, we’re going to focus on what free speech means within the context of one person who’s been through it all. That is my co-host, Marc Steiner. He turned 80 earlier this year. Today, I sit down with Marc to discuss all of these incredible layers of his life: community organizing, theater, education, journalism, what they all mean for him, and how they all add up to nearly seven decades standing up and fighting for free speech, and how they fit into the battle for free speech today. That is where we’re going to spend this hour. I’m so excited because the stories of his life are incredible. They’re often funny. And for me, they really take the idea of free speech to another level. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

MARC STEINER:  And the backstory is that A, my mother always raised us with clarity about race, that there’s no difference between races. We’re all the same. We’re all human beings. And when I was 11, I wanted to join the Boy Scouts, just dying to be a Boy Scout. Read all the books. My English grandmother and uncle sent me books about British Boy Scouts, and I was just really into it. 

And so, my mom and Mrs. Jackson, who is a Black woman who worked as a domestic in our home, were sitting at the end of the workday together, as they usually did, having coffee and cake before Mrs. Jackson left. And she was being picked up by her nephew, Mr. Dennis Foster. 

And so, they were eating, and I ran downstairs saying, Mom, Mom, I’ll be 11 years old next week. I got to join the Boy Scouts. You got to sign me up. And she said, all right, love, we’ll sign you up straight away. Beth Tfiloh, Monday morning, which is the local synagogue that we used to go to. And I said, Mom, I don’t want to be in a Jewish troop. I want to be in a troop with all kinds of kids, which didn’t exist. 

And Mr. Foster, who’s African American, put his coffee cup down, looked over the table and said, I’m a scout master. You can join my troop. And my mother, I remember, I could still see her face. She said, oh, that’s a lovely idea. And she knew exactly what that meant. 

And so that Monday he picked me up in his Mercury at the house and we drive off from Northwest Baltimore and past the golf course and went down to a street called Garrison Boulevard and into Walbrook Junction, which was the separating line between Black and white neighborhoods. And we kept on going down North Avenue, and all of a sudden the world became Black. Went down, made a right on Broadway, which is a deeply working-class Black neighborhood. Made a left on Ashland Avenue and ended up in front of the Faith Baptist Church. And there I joined an integrated troop, as I always say, because I integrated it. 

And so, I was a little Jewish boy in 1957 in segregated Baltimore in an all-Black Boy Scout troop where I learned firsthand about racism as a little boy. Whether it was the Boy Scout troops that we camped near in the Boy Scout camp, they were mostly white troops. And then one kid saying to me, what are you doing in a troop with all those Ns for? And I remember that just shocking, a Boy Scout would use that word. 

Or when we went out with Mr. Foster to get some ice cream or whatever and we stopped in front of an ice cream shop and kids got out of the car. And I remember sitting there in the car, and I’ll never forget his words. He looked in the window and said, Marc, wherever we can go, you can go. And those kind of things became foundational for me in understanding what kind of society we live in as a little boy, what we faced.

And so, that time when I was 13 and we were at Mondawmin Shopping Center and my mom said, well, ask the picket captain. And I went down there, and Skip Logan was the leader of the picket line — And he was also the head of the Civic Interest Group, which was Baltimore’s arm of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which is a major radical civil rights group — Said, sure, gave me a picket sign, and I started going to CIG meetings and became very active. 

They wouldn’t let me sit in until I was 16 because they didn’t want me getting arrested if I didn’t… And the first arrest I had was in Cambridge, Maryland, which we used to call Maryland’s Mississippi. It was rough. I was 16, arrested, and I was the youngest, whitest thing there. And they pulled me out and put me in this room, looked like a kitchen. And then all these cops, maybe, I don’t remember how many, six, eight cops surrounding the table, and wanted me to sign this document that said I was coerced by communists to come down to foment trouble among the negro population of Cambridge, Maryland.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow, Marc.

MARC STEINER:  And I refused to sign. And then it proceeded to get hot, and they poured hot coffee on my head and smacked me around and punched me around and hit me and all kinds of stuff. And I wouldn’t sign. 

And, it’s a digression, my mother, she was a tough lady. She was beautiful and tough. But she always told us, the three of us, the kids, to come home on your shield. That was her line to us. You are a Round, her maiden name. We never back down. You come home on your shield. So I didn’t sign [laughs].

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow.

MARC STEINER:  And so mom got me out, took me home, and I got fixed up. So, I continued on the picket line and continued working in Cambridge and going between Cambridge and Baltimore. The only trouble was that I started screwing up in school because I was so involved between the Civil Rights Movement and the street corner, I didn’t get much school time in [both laugh].

MICHAEL FOX:  What was it about Cambridge? What was it about Cambridge, Maryland, that was —

MARC STEINER:  Cambridge was, there were two focal points of the Civil Rights Movement in Maryland. One was Baltimore because it was the biggest city with the largest Black population, except for all-Black towns in Prince George’s County and some other places. And Cambridge, Maryland, which was the Eastern Shore of Maryland that you had to pass through going to Eastern Shore. Eastern Shore was literally like Mississippi. It was the Deep South in Maryland. So, our work was in both places. 

And in Cambridge, we were both picketing to integrate things, but we were sitting in, and we were registering people to vote. And the leader of that movement was a woman who became very famous in America just because she became a figure. Her name was Gloria Richardson.

GLORIA RICHARDSON [CLIP]:  Still we had segregated hospitals, housing, jobs…

MARC STEINER:  I interviewed her years later on my radio show in the ’90s. She was really old then. And I remember one of the greatest days of my life because I was in Cambridge, set the equipment up, about to do the interview. And she looked at me and said, I remember you. You were that little white boy. That was a great day. She actually remembered me. 

And so it was a rough place. And I really literally was beaten and tortured in the prison. They wanted me to sign a paper, I wouldn’t sign. But anyway, that was the civil rights era.

And I had a very weird teenagehood. It started out because I was a white boy in an all-Black Boy Scout troop on the East side of town, which was a working-class community. I started hanging out with this group of Black guys, two groups of Black guys. One was the Imperials who were the sons of Black doctors, lawyers, judges, middle-class guys, still close to some of them. 

And the other was the guys on the corner. That happened because when I was in junior high school in the seventh, eighth grade, I was friends with some of the Black guys in class, and it was newly integrated and majority of kids were white, but there was a huge population of Black students. And we became friends and I started hanging out with them, and that was the street corner. 

So, I had these two worlds I was part of. And I was also a member of the Young Socialist Alliance, which was a Trotskyist youth group that I joined when I was 15. And so, I was a young revolutionary.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, you also refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer in school, right?

MARC STEINER:  In the 10th grade when I got to City, which was a high school, I refused to take part in opening exercises, which then became part of a Supreme Court decision that I was mentioned in. So, you had a pledge of allegiance and you read the Lord’s Prayer, and I refused to do that. It was the Lord’s Prayer as well. I refused to do the Lord’s Prayer. And when they did opening exercises, I would leave the homeroom and stand out in the hallway till it was done and then have to walk back in. And the same thing when it came to giant student assemblies. I get up, walk out of the assembly with thousands of students, and walk back in after the opening exercises. 

So, I became a target. One day, there used to be these trucks that would be outside the school [at] lunchtime selling food to kids who didn’t want to eat in the cafeteria to go out to get food from these food trucks, and I was standing outside the pizza wagon. And these, I don’t remember, seven or nine white guys semicircled me around the wagon. And I looked back, and I said, OK, here we go, and I ordered my pizza. And the guy said, we don’t like no N lovers in the school. And I looked back and I said, sound like a personal problem to me, man. What you want me to do about it? And they came at me. And when they did, the pizza came out. I grabbed the hot pizza and pulled it out and threw it in his face. So, he had this hot pizza burning on his face.

MICHAEL FOX:  Oh my gosh.

MARC STEINER:  And these guys jumped at me and beat me up. And I walked back into the classroom after lunch and my shirt was torn. I was bloody and shit. The teachers told me, you need to go to the nurse. The guy sitting next to me was a guy named Stokes who was Black — Because our chairs were assigned by alphabetical order, so I was sitting next to Stokes since I’m Steiner. And Stokes said, what happened to you, man? I told him, he said, what? Next thing I knew after school, all these Black guys beat up all these white guys because of what happened to me. And I got suspended. And I cut school, got suspended. 

And then one morning the homeroom teacher said, Steiner, this is no damn standing. Go sit in your seat. And I said, Mr. Camps, if you can’t speak to me with a little respect don’t talk to me at all. And he said, what did you say? And he walked over to where I was sitting ,and he had his yardstick in his hand, and he picked it up. Said, what did you say, Steiner? When he raised the yardstick, I went boom, and hit him. And so all these teachers came in and grabbed my ass and took me down to the principal’s office, vice principal’s office, Mr. Yost and Dr. Greenberg, who was a vice principal who had graduated at that high school with my father in the class of ’29.

MICHAEL FOX:  Oh my gosh.

MARC STEINER:  Called the hospital where my dad had just gotten out of surgery. He was a surgeon. Pop had to come up to the place, and vice principal went, Al, this is Marc’s junior year at City. He opened up some whiteout, which was when people typed on typewriters had whiteout to cross things out, opened up a bottle of whiteout. Said, this is Marc’s junior year at City, whoosh. Get him out.

MICHAEL FOX:  Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, Marc.

MARC STEINER:  So, I was banned from all City Schools, and my junior year never existed. I was sent away. And I saw I was in the Civil Rights Movement. And it was after that that I got beaten up in the Eastern Shore and my parents came and got me and brought me back. But I kept staying in that. And my life was between [the] Civil Rights Movement and the street corner and some other radical groups I was part of, Young Socialist Alliance, Fellowship House, things like that. What I didn’t do was go to school.

MICHAEL FOX:  [Laughs] This Supreme Court case that you said that you were part of for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer and stuff, what was this court case?

MARC STEINER:  My name was only mentioned, it wasn’t my case. But there was a student in Baltimore who also refused to take part in opening exercises. His case went all the way up, and that’s the reason they took prayer out of schools.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. Wow.

MARC STEINER:  And so it was me and two other guys in Baltimore who didn’t take part in the opening exercises. It wasn’t my case, though.

MICHAEL FOX:  Yeah. You know, what’s fascinating about this, Marc, is that when I was talking with Mary Anne Franks, she’s the professor, the law professor at George Washington University. She said that for her, one of the most — And I don’t remember the court case, I don’t remember if it was this one or another one — But she said that the court case in the Supreme Court which defended people’s right to not say the Pledge of Allegiance was exactly what the First Amendment should be. Because not only should it give us the right to speak out, but it should also give us the right to remain silent in moments that we don’t want to follow the doctrine of the US. And she said that is the example of what the First Amendment and what free speech should be in the United States. I thought, that’s so interesting. I didn’t realize that you had a similar experience.

MARC STEINER:  It was in some ways an isolating experience because I would walk out of the homeroom and I have to walk out of these assemblies that I said earlier. And it was jarring because I was like this target for being this weird kid.

MICHAEL FOX:  Why did you not say it? Why did you not participate in the assemblies?

MARC STEINER:  Because I believed that religion had no place in public schools as a kid. My father wasn’t real happy with it, but both my parents were atheists. Even though my mother converted to Judaism, they were both atheists. I was raised in this contradictory world where both my parents were atheists. And every twice a week — Because I was also kicked out of Jewish schools — When you were Jewish, if you didn’t go to Jewish school, you went to Jewish school twice a week in the afternoon. It’s like Hebrew lessons and everything else. And I was kicked out of there too. And so Mr. Manischewitz, who was a Holocaust survivor who taught there, would come to my house twice a week to teach me the Talmud, the Torah, Hebrew, Jewish history. And so I was steeped in that as a kid. 

Well, first, to me, it was Christianizing the prayer in school. And what about us who don’t believe in Jesus?

MICHAEL FOX:  How incredible was it that your mom supported your organizing? She supported your activism. Did she always remain steadfast in defending you and in supporting you standing up?

MARC STEINER:  Yeah. She was, always, she was a radical Brit. She came from a family of miners who ended up owning the coal mine in England. She was a radical as a young person. She was a member of the Communist Party in Britain for six months. Didn’t jive with her free spirit so she left. But she was always a little different than the rest. Everybody loved her, but she was a little different than the rest. She was an actor. And with my kids, we went out and caught butterflies and labeled them and found amphibians and reptiles in the rivers and brought them home and created terrariums. And she also liked her vodka [laughs]. Mom liked her vodka. She was a trip. She was a trip.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. Marc, I want to move forward a little bit in the timeline. When you were banned from city schools in Baltimore, you ended up going, was it called Stockbridge?

MARC STEINER:  Yeah.

MICHAEL FOX:  Tell me about Stockbridge. And is it true that you actually shared a room with Arlo Guthrie?

MARC STEINER:  We were roommates. That was in our junior year. We still stay in touch. In our junior year. 

So, I ended up at Stockbridge because I couldn’t go to any public or private school in Baltimore because I also punched out… The kid showed me around friend school the day I was supposed to go to friends. I asked him a simple question. His father owned Glen Echo Amusement Park that we were picketing to integrate. When he said, we keep our Ns to a minimum, I said, what did you say? And that was it. That’s all she wrote. So, I couldn’t go anywhere.

So, when I ended up in Stockbridge, the headmaster came down to Baltimore to interview me. His name was Hans Maeder. And Hans was a Marcusian socialist who was in the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany in the ’30s and ’40s, and an educator. Interesting guy. Hans Maeder, M-A-E-D-E-R. I say Hans because we all called our teachers by their first name at Stockbridge. And we went out to Miller Brothers, which was then Baltimore’s fanciest restaurant. And so he asked me, this is 1963. He said, so tell me, Marc. I want to know who your heroes are. I said, Che Guevara and Malcolm X. And he said, oh, this is wonderful, you must come to my school. And I ended up in this co-educational interracial international boarding school in the Berkshires with this incredible radical faculty. And many of my best friends are still from that era, from my experience there. 

So, that’s why I ended up there. And I graduated in ’65 instead of ’64, but it’s all right. And it was a great experience. It saved my ass. It saved my ass, A, from the street corner because I was on the road to ending up in juvenile jail for other stuff. And it was a great place to have ended up. That county had a couple of really progressive schools for whatever reason. They flocked to Berkshire County.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. Amazing. Amazing. 

Marc, were you at the March on Washington?

MARC STEINER:  ’63?

MICHAEL FOX:  Yeah.

MARC STEINER:  Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah absolutely there. Cause I was in the Civic Interest Group, which, as I said, was Baltimore’s arm of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And we all took the bus down from Faith Baptist Church down to DC. It was an amazing day. It was hot as hell. I dressed the wrong way, but it was OK. 

So yeah, I was there because I was in the Civil Rights Movement. And so all of us who had been part of what was going on in Cambridge and in Baltimore and on Route 40, Freedom Riders, we were there. Yeah, we were there.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. That’s such an iconic moment in US history. It’s almost hard to believe that actually even happened in real life because it’s so iconic.

MARC STEINER:  A quarter of a million people of all races together in Washington, DC, at one time.

MICHAEL FOX:  What did that feel like, Marc?

MARC STEINER:  It was amazing. Because you’re on demonstrations and you maybe have 20, 30 people with you when you’re on the picket line or we’re sitting in or whatever. It was very different. This is a mass of America from across America. That and being part of the Poor People’s Campaign in ’68 were amazing experiences just because of what they brought and the numbers of people from all different communities across the country being in DC at one time. It was amazing. It was a day I’ll never forget. It was huge for me because I wasn’t in school either. So I was a full-time activist and getting ready to be shipped off to Berkshire County [laughs].

MICHAEL FOX:  Talk to me a little bit about the Poor People’s Campaign, your organizing for it. I know that you were there in DC in those days. Tell me a little bit more about your role.

MARC STEINER:  Well, I was living in DC. We were founding Liberation News Service at the time and I was working with the Washington Free Press. And in SDS, there’s a thing called ERAP.

MICHAEL FOX:  Students for Democratic Society.

MARC STEINER:  I’m sorry, Students for Democratic Society, which was the leading radical left group on campuses across the country. And within SDS, there was a thing called ERAP, Economic and Research Action Project, which were people in SDS who went into poor communities to move into communities to organize. And so one of those communities was in Chicago in Uptown.

CLIP 1:  …Southern ghetto, a lot of people who’s migrated from the South to the North, do better jobs and stuff like that. We had a school set up to teach neighborhood people how the system works in the United States…

MARC STEINER:  And they had an organization there called the Young Patriots who were the equivalent of the Black Panthers in the poor white community. So, I got very close to them when I was in SDS and did a lot of work with them. And still one of the guys there, Hy Thurman, is back down. He’s still around. I’ve done a bunch of interviews with him about his work over the years. So, our job was to organize the poor white community into Resurrection City. And so we went all through poor white working class communities in the United States, especially in the Northeast, at least I did, and in Appalachia itself to organize them to come down to be part of Resurrection City.

CLIP 2:  Since the middle of May, the campsite of Resurrection City has housed the poor marchers campaigning in Washington. The murder earlier this year of Dr. Martin Luther King gave renewed intensity to the demands for equal opportunities as the underprivileged came to petition the power for a new deal and a new hope.

CLIP 3:  A lot of people knew the condition of some of these places. And I think that when they see and know the condition that a lot of people will be interested enough to try to make things better.

MARC STEINER:  It was interesting. Encampment of mostly white Southern poor that flew the battle flag of Dixie above their encampment because it was the rebel flag. Nobody gave a shit in the camps about that. And it was a pretty amazing experience. Here you have this encampment of Black folks from across America, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, poor whites, some Asians, some Chinese and Japanese people in this living together, eating together, cooking together, working together. And it made a statement that to this day, it’s what pushes me to do the work I do because you can see what is possible if you organize and fight.

CLIP 4:  We’re building our own house over there, and I want to tell you something. It looks better than anything that we have in Brownsville. We got our house better than anything in Flatbush, which is middle class.

CLIP 5:  It is working down in Resurrection City. And please listen to that. That beautiful thing down there is just the top of a movement that stretches from coast to coast.

CLIP 6:  This is the last chance, I think, for this country to sort of respond to the quiet and peaceful petitions of people for asking for very, very just solutions to very, very real problems.

MARC STEINER:  So, I was there until they tore down Resurrection City when they came in. And I had an apartment in DC because that’s where I was living. That and the Institute of Policy Studies became like refugee centers for people who were forced out of the Resurrection City.

The saddest part of it was there was no structure beyond that moment to keep it together, to create a movement that did change things, but could really have changed things had we had something to solidify it and make it come together. But many things came out of that in different parts of the country. It was a historically important moment in this country, critically important. It began when King was assassinated and his body laying in state in DC for a while, and it could have been a greater moment than it was, but it was an important moment in our history.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, I want to just pause for a second. All of this organizing activism, obviously this is a podcast about free speech, and I want to connect it up to free speech. What does all of this mean for you for free speech in your mind? How does free speech straddle all of these issues in terms of organizing in your teens and your 20s?

MARC STEINER:  The movement that began at Berkeley with Mario Savio, who was a civil rights worker. What’s important to take note here is that that movement exploded, and it was led by people who were white, who were civil rights workers in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and then went back to their campuses. And so I always look at the free speech movement was birthed by the Civil Rights Movement. They were radicalized to fight when they go back. And that was one of the causes on their campuses that they fought for.

And it happened across America. Berkeley was the center, but I was at Maryland, the University of Maryland, ’65. And in ‘64, I was still at Stockbridge, but it became something I was just obsessed with. It was a movement that frightened the establishment because in part what it came from, the civil rights, but also because these academic establishments were these “state institutions” that controlled life on campus. This was the first major disruptions that took place in decades on campuses.

CLIP 7:  You could never believe such a thing could happen at the University of California where this many students have said they’ve had enough and they’re going to stand up right now. Thank you [applause].

MARC STEINER:  And that helped radicalize an entire movement, student movement in this country. That was the beginning of it. Without the free speech movements, there wouldn’t have been an SDS with that kind of power. So, it was a critical movement in changing America. And many of those students remained radicalized, organized, and continued on. And I think that’s what people forget even though the movement kind of waned and died, that particular movement, the people in it continued to push. Most universities were run by the wealth of this country, and these establishment figures who ran that wealth also ran our universities. That was the first major confrontation against that in that era.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, talk about the Washington Free Press and the Liberation News Service. How were you involved? What were those outlets?

MARC STEINER:  Well, I was involved first off with the Washington Free Press. After I was flunked out of college, I moved to Dupont Circle, which is a neighborhood in DC, which is around the corner from Washington Free Press. And I met the guys, the people from Washington Free Press. We hit it off immediately, and I started writing for them and working with them, and also with SDS at large in DC. We actually had… The radical movement had rented a building near Dupont Circle and Logan Circle, which was three stories. The different movements had their headquarters in that building.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow.

MARC STEINER:  I was there, a guy named Marshall Bloom and I organized a national conference of all the underground papers in the country to come to DC for a weeklong meeting because there were underground papers across America then. Every city had one. Everybody had one. Small cities, big cities, college towns, they were everywhere. And so we brought them together to start what became Liberation News Service, which really became an effective movement. We were collecting stories from across the globe, across the country, and giving it out to all the papers across the country to use and creating a communication between the underground papers and some college papers, Michigan, Chicago, Wisconsin, other places around the country. So, in its lifetime, it was a very effective group.

MICHAEL FOX:  I think it’s fascinating to think about how that communication was happening back then because right now everything is, oh, it’s all internet. You just send an email. It’s super easy.

MARC STEINER:  Oh, right. There’s no internet.

MICHAEL FOX:  Right. No. And so back in those days, what is this? Over telephone, you’re sending —

MARC STEINER:  Telephone and US mail.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow.

MARC STEINER:  Yeah. Telephone and US mail. That was the only way to communicate, only way it could happen.

MICHAEL FOX:  What was it about the media, the underground media and the writing? What is it that called your attention? Why did you want to get involved in this?

MARC STEINER:  The largest group created papers that were alternative weeklies speaking to a different population, against the war, for the Civil Rights Movement, for the radical movement, the countercultural movement that took place in the late ’60s, early ’70s. So, it had its audience, and in alliance with groups like The Black Panther newspaper and other Black and Latino newspapers around the country that were part of it as well. 

But it was this alternative press that made a big difference because people actually read it. It brought community together in ways that doesn’t exist right now. We’ve got this right here where we’re working at Real News, which in some ways is the grandchild of the underground press. But there were so many, every locality had one. I can’t think of a part of our country did not have a piece of the underground press. 

So, we were able with Liberation News Service to share stories around the country, to bring stories in from Europe and Asia and Africa and share them with the papers around the country and also bring people together to talk strategically about what it means to create a newspaper and underground press and how that’s an organizing tool.

It was a great period. It was the same period where we were involved in draft resistance. It was the same period where we were smuggling people out of the country into Canada to get out of the army that I was involved in as well. We actually thought the revolution was at hand. Little did we know [laughs]. It wasn’t about to happen. But it was a significant movement.

MICHAEL FOX:  Was there a backlash by elites, by the forces that be against the underground papers or was it so underground that it wasn’t a big deal?

MARC STEINER:  That’s a great question. What was the demise of the underground papers? That’d be a really interesting question to explore. Part of it was people drifting away and getting older and the movement dissipating and just not being there anymore. It could have been something as simple as that.

MICHAEL FOX:  But it’s at the same time as COINTELPRO was happening, right?

MARC STEINER:  Oh, no, no, no. Look man, here’s the story. I guess this was 1960, early ’68 maybe. And we had some telephone problems. So, we asked the local Washington company to come over and fix it. And they were doing that. And then the guy who was working on it said, hey, you want us to fix the other phones? And we went, sure. Which other phones do you mean? And he said, just half a block away at whatever the number was, 17 something P Street. We were 1719 P Street. And we said, oh, sure. You can take those out.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow.

MARC STEINER:  So, they were bugging [laughs]. So, the feds were collecting information on us literally across the road. There were no real indictments of the place, at least where we were in Washington. But when the movement got more militant and more aggressive and, like all my friends in SDS who became part of the Weather Underground, that was a different time, then they came after everybody. 

In ’68, I went to Cuba. January, February, March of ’68, I was in Cuba. They came after us who went there. They tried to seize our passports. They harassed us. They got me fired from a job, and one job wouldn’t fire me. That was a couple of years later when they came again. So, they did go after… If you were on the left and you were still active, they came over to silence you.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, fast forwarding a couple years, talk about the Tenants Union Group in Baltimore.

MARC STEINER:  So, as I said earlier, in SDS, there’s a group called ERAP. And these were people who went out, Tom Hayden, others, who was probably the most famous of the crew, went out to organize in different working-class communities across the United States. So, that was the early stages of people doing that. We weren’t part of ERAP, but we were just revolutionists and radicals who wanted to go introduce organizing. 

Baltimore had, because of the steel mills, because of the docks, a lot of people ended up taking jobs in those places, the auto plant, to organize internally inside unions in the workplace. And then people moved into the communities to continue the organizing in the community. So, we had collective houses across Baltimore in neighborhoods like Waverly, South Baltimore, Pig Town, across the city. And so, there were four of us who knew each other really well. And we moved down to South Baltimore and got really involved in both the South Baltimore voice and in creating their Tenants Union Group.

We went out to organize tenants of these slumlords, mostly white. Well, white and Blacks. There was a street called Charles Street, which is the main thoroughfare in Baltimore, but the bottom part of it in this part of Baltimore was the divide between Black and white working-class communities in South Baltimore. The Black community was called Sharp-Leadenhall, which before the Civil War was one of the oldest, biggest free Black communities in the country.

Anyway, so we began to organize. And other things were happening too. Radicals in Charles Village, was a neighborhood, and those of us organizing in Waverly, another white, Black working-class community, we created the People’s Free Medical Clinic with radical young doctors and nurses to serve the people. We created a People’s Free Grocery Store where my ex, still my dear friend, and my daughter lived above it. And it was a grocery store where there were no profits made, but were there to serve the people to give them food. They can buy food at cost. 

And we had a People’s Free Garage that was started by two people in the John Brown Collective that I was part of as well. After South Baltimore, I was part of the John Brown Collective. And the People’s Free Garage was a place where these two guys, Michael O’Brien and Gene Flanagan. Gene was a vet and Mike was just one of the big Irish boys. And they knew cars, and they started this garage where people could come fix their cars and work on their cars and be taught how to work on their cars. 

So, we had all these collective cooperative movements that we started in the city. So, it was really a center of radicalism that hasn’t gotten much play in terms of our history. 

And it was mostly really a working-class movement. It wasn’t just college kids but people who lived in the community who were radicalized in different ways so that in 1971 when the invasion of Laos happened, we organized a demonstration against the war. 

In that demonstration, there were a lot of Vietnam vets who were part of our work and other people as well. And what they didn’t expect, the police, was that they thought we’d be like college kids and run. The difference was it wasn’t that kind of group. It was a group of hard-fighting, hard-drinking, crazy working-class kids. So when the police attacked, we all stood and fought, and really fought. The headline I still have on my wall at home, which said 21 police sent to the hospital. And people got charges like assault and battery, intent to commit mayhem and murder and other things like that. And I was charged, but that’s another story, because I broke this cop’s nose when he tried to arrest me. 

So, it was a really center of radicalism, both in organizing and in militancy in the city. And it changed laws. I mean, TUG changed the tenant laws in Baltimore working with radical legal aid lawyers who were on the left working in legal aid. And we would organize rent strikes and put the money aside in case we had to give it back. But anyway, we actually changed the law to benefit the tenants of Baltimore through our work, through our rent strikes. 

So, it was a heady period in the early ’70s here. We were doing a lot of stuff. People’s Free Medical Clinic was unheard of. It was like doctors and nurses giving their time when they were not getting paid to work in a medical clinic for poor working class people in the city. So, it was a very special time to be part of. Nobody planned it that way. It just happened. We were just there and we just began to organize and work.

MICHAEL FOX:  There’s something I think that’s really important that is oftentimes missed or people don’t make this connection, and that is the deep roots between organizing, activism, standing up, and our right to free speech. And I don’t necessarily mean the free speech movement. I just mean our right to stand up and speak out. I feel like these are two different things. Someone might be, oh, First Amendment. Oh yeah, that’s over here. Or oh, that’s our right to speak. And then organizing activism or protesting, it’s as if they’re separate, but they’re not. 

You said something a couple of episodes ago that really stuck with me and you said free speech is organizing. It is coming together and taking action to actually organize. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MARC STEINER:  Free speech is at the root of the struggle for independence in the 18th century in this country. That’s where it began. You may have gone past that in terms of Marx and the wobblies and the rest, but the roots we’re in is very American.

And that we demand the right to say [what] we have to say and to organize and to stand up and speak. And if it’s done right, it can be a very scary opposition to those in power. And I think that’s what we saw. And I think there’s a movement afoot now to clamp down on free speech in this country. I see a lot of what we face in America today as a reaction to what we did 50 years ago that’s been building over these decades. And the fight to stop free speech is part of it. You’re seeing it across the country. On campuses today, many campuses are doing their best to shut down radical protestors on their campuses, to end the right to stand up and say what you have to say. It’s one of the fundamental rights in any democratic society. You can’t have it without it. It’s uncomfortable. It can be misused, but you have to have it.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, talk to me about theater and what theater means to you. It’s been a huge part of your life, but it’s something that when I go back and when I hear stories or you tell stories, it’s like the theater piece, which is so important and that you’ve worked in theater for years, those stories end up sidelined a little bit or I don’t hear that often. Talk to me about what does theater mean to you and how important has this been in your life and why?

MARC STEINER:  Theater’s always been part of my life since I was a teenager, especially once I got to Stockbridge, the high school I graduated from. But we had this Broadway theater guy as our acting teacher and stuff. 

But I think that theater of the streets and the underground theaters across America and the world played a vital role. We would do street theater against the Vietnam War where we would act out what’s happening to the Vietnamese and actually pulling people into it who are on the street. It didn’t always work so well because people resisted, but that was part of it. And we made the bridge between this is what happens to the Vietnamese people and we’re dressed like American soldiers. 

So, I think that there’s always been a radical left element in theater, especially in Europe and here in the United States. And I think that it has always played an important role. Things like the living stage in DC. The guerilla theater movements in New York and San Francisco and LA and Baltimore where we would act out things on the corner to show the world what was going on in Vietnam, to show the world what was going on in poor communities, to show the world the threat against our very democracy and rights to freedom in this country. I haven’t thought about this in a while. There were some brilliant theatrical minds who dove into this all over. 

And I think that, in retrospect, it had a greater effect than you think. Because you’re bringing theater into community and into the streets that make people stop, especially when you pull them into it, force them to be part of it. And they weren’t expecting that.

So what people don’t realize it doesn’t get much play, it got play in some books, is that theater has always been part of political movements, especially on the left. More on the left than the right for sure. And they were in the Civil Rights Movement. There was Freedom Theater and part of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And the music was, the Freedom Singers as well. And we had Living Theater in New York City, which was a group nobody knows about anymore, but it was this incredible theater on the streets. They went out and did this incredible work, original work that really talked to issues and talked to people. They were an influence on me. 

I’ve been in theater forever. And I taught at Baltimore School for the Arts for 15 years. The sophomore ensemble was mine. And I worked in prison theater. I ran a therapy program for inmates under 21 in an adult prison. And a world famous actor came out of our group, Charles S. Dutton, who left us too soon. He became known as Roc, and he had a TV show called Roc. So, I started a theater company in the prison and we performed in the prison and guys flocked to it because I did theater classes twice a week inside jail. A good part of my life it was at the center of my work.

And being inspired by left theater in Paris, in London, New York, in Palestine-Israel where actors were crossing boundaries early, the Palestinian and Israelis coming together to do political theater. And those things are getting lost. And they’re very effective, and they become a voice that doesn’t get heard otherwise.

People don’t realize in SNCC, the Freedom Theater that performed all throughout the South. Nobody talks about that anymore, but they were doing these performances in churches, in cotton fields across the South. And political theater seems to have lost its power at this moment. It may resurrect itself. Always does. 

But it’s incredibly important because you’re doing… When we had guerilla theater in the streets around the Vietnam War, we did it all over Washington, DC, is where we had our Washington Guerilla Theater. And we would literally pull people out of the crowds and make them prisoners to give them the feeling, what it felt like to be a Vietnamese stuck in this hell of an American war. And in working-class communities, it gave people an outlet, a creative outlet they didn’t have before. We became from weirdo theater people into actually being part of the community.

MICHAEL FOX:  It’s incredible how, as you’re mentioning this, it comes to mind just how much theater is this deep form of communication because you’re not just telling a story, but you’re actually part of it. You’re actually acting it out. And particularly when it’s guerilla or when it’s on the street, you’re trying to incorporate other people. So, you’re literally being immersed in the story as if you are an actor, as if you’re actually living it yourself and how profound that is. It’s another form of communication, but even more active. But even more active.

MARC STEINER:  You had the Living Theater, you had the Diggers, you had the Art Workers’ Coalition, and Guerilla Action Group. You had all these groups around the country who were deeply involved in community life. And what they did was interpret people’s lives through the theater. Interpret what you’re going through through theater. To have a creative outlet to allow that to happen.

And they were part of a movement. We did that when we were organizing the Tenants Union Group. Besides changing the law, we actually created theater in the community about what it felt like to be evicted from your home. You interview people, get their stories, and you turn that into theater to tell people what they went through, the struggles they’ve gone through to tell that story. And we did that with Vietnam vets, took down their stories and then performed their stories to talk about what people went through. And there were very highly emotional pieces that really affected people because you were using… And some of the people who acted with us were Vietnam vets, [a lot of us] were not Vietnam vets. We were anti-war vets. 

But to tell that story and also to tell the story using the voices of Vietnamese, we turned some of that into radio theater as well. When I did my Vietnam documentary series, we did nine audio documentaries and some video, most of them were audio. We spent a lot of time with Vietnamese actors and bringing stories back to create stories that emotionally told the story of what it was like to live through that war from the Vietnamese side.

Political theater is not always popular with some people, but it’s important. If there’s anything I miss more than other stuff, it’s missing the theater. I miss the theater. I do. I might have to rectify that.

MICHAEL FOX:  That’s right. 

Marc, what was the first time that you were on air? Tell me the story of how your show began.

MARC STEINER:  Everything in my life has been an accident [Fox laughs]. Nothing completely planned, totally. So, it was 1992, ’93. I was trying to create a history of the Jewish people through their music. It was the history of Jewish music. And we did a couple of episodes. WJHU then was the public radio station of Baltimore. I raised some money, did a bunch of interviews, and I was trying to create this history of Jewish music. I was trying to make a bridge then because I was, having been a Zionist, I wasn’t part of the anti-Zionist movement, I was trying to build a bridge to tell the story. But anyway, so that’s how it began.

So, at the station, for various reasons, the series didn’t take off. But I went into the general manager’s office, David Craig, good guy. And he said to me, Marc, we’re thinking about starting maybe a talk radio thing on the station — It was a classical station then — And he said, you know Baltimore, you know politics, you know life, you know lots of stuff. What do you think about that? And out of my mouth came, I think you should let me be the host [Fox laughs]. He said, what? You don’t know radio? You’ve never even run a radio show. How could you be the host? I said, give me the mic. I’ll be the host. 

And so we went back and forth, and he opened a door he shouldn’t have opened. And I kept bugging him. I kept hocking him. Hocking is the Yiddish term for bugging somebody. I kept hocking him. And he finally said, OK, man, look, I’m taking All Things Considered off every Tuesday night from 7:00 to 8:30. No money. No producer. See what you can do. And I said, OK, I’ll take it.

And I did. And the first show I did was a debate on Norplant. Nobody knows what Norplant is anymore.

MICHAEL FOX:  No.

MARC STEINER:  Norplant was a controversial drug implanted in women’s arms to keep them from getting pregnant. And it was being used in inner city neighborhoods. So, I had this debate between four people, pro and con. That was the first show. 

And then it just grew from there. Every week, I would do a show a week on many different subjects. I did a show from inside prison, inside a juvenile center. I did shows on abortion rights. I did shows interviewing politicians. And we did a lot of community. We led a lot of broadcasting from the community itself. And then the show went from Tuesday nights to Tuesday and Thursday. And then it went from Tuesday and Thursday to Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And then it went from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And we just built the show out.

And then they decided to sell the station. Johns Hopkins wanted to sell the station. So, I helped lead the movement to buy the station. And we raised the money to buy the station. And I went to all these really wealthy people and raised money from listeners and raised 5 million bucks and bought the station. And then I was vice president for broadcast, and I went to a full-time talk show host as well, Monday through Friday, noon to 2:00. That’s how it started. And it opened a world for me that allowed me to bring voices to the air that wouldn’t be heard anywhere else.

[Overlapping radio clips play]

We did the work that other public radio stations did, public radio shows did. But we brought voices on from the left. We brought voices on from poor working-class communities. We brought voices on organizers, and we brought the traditional points on as well. But to me it was a balance that was missing from poor working communities, from organizers, and bringing issues up they didn’t want to bring up. 

And so, we built the show and it became very popular, and we ended up buying two other radio stations in Maryland. So, the broadcast went across the state into DC and up into Pennsylvania and into West Virginia and then became nationally known, and I eventually lost the internal wars where I was pushed out. That led to a revolt where people picketed the station for like six months, but never got back there. 

No public radio station had ever brought voices of color onto the station as the main part of the broadcast, and I did that, and to really broaden the audience in ways that didn’t exist before. It was a great part. It was great. It was a lot of work, but it radically changed radio in Baltimore, at least for that period.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, what should journalism be? Real journalism, for you?

MARC STEINER:  Oh, Lord… real journalism has to get under the headlines and under the news. Real journalism has to bring in voices that are not heard anywhere else. Not just your pontificators or paid a huge salary. I mean, they’re part of it as well. They’re going to be there, but you got to bring other voices in. You can’t be cozy with elected officials. Your job is to question elected officials, not to be their best friend. Your job is to bring the voices of the street, of the community, whatever that community is, to the airwaves. 

For me, in terms of racism and race in America, it means no matter what subject you’re talking about, whatever that is, whether it’s politics or theater or music or culture, whatever it is, you have to bring voices of color into the conversation, always. And in this city that meant Black voices, Latino voices, whatever that is, that you can’t let it be the domain of white men talking. And I know I’m a white man talking, but that’s not the point. The point is when you’re doing the work, you have to change it from the inside.

One of the attacks I got when I was in WYPR from the guy who took over the company and from some of the board members is there were too many Black people on the air. And that mindset’s there, and you have to fight it.

One of the great beauties of America, as we know, this country has its issues and they run deep, but we are the most multiracial, multicultural nation in the history of humankind. We have to make that part of our work. We have to let that resonate. We have to make that part of what we produce and do and work. We forget that. 

Yeah, racism runs deep. Class issues are pervasive. We’re fighting to save the environment. All that’s real, but we are an amazing place in many ways. And we forget that. For all its faults and all the fact that this country was founded by men who enslaved other human beings. The documents they wrote for white men belong to all of us. And so they had no idea they were birthing a democratic movement to upset the world, but they did. And I think those things are really important to remember.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, I listened to a talk you gave a while back, and in the talk you had a story about the question of what is communication? And there was a group of Native Americans there who had an incredible vision or understanding of what this was. Do you remember the story?

MARC STEINER:  I do. Exactly. It was something that changed my entire approach to my work. So, this one guy, Joe Waterman, he was an Arapaho holy man. They have four holy people in their nation. He was one of the four. We became very close. And we had a conversation in public and he asked the question, what is communication? And everybody had ideas, making sure you could say what you have to say and putting your ideas out there and being forceful and all those other things we would say. And he looked around the room and said, it’s one thing. It’s listening. Listening.

So, it was the beginning of my radio career, and I realized that’s the key to running conversations. That’s the key to producing something is listening to what other people have to say, not just listening to yourself, but hearing what they say and letting that kind of push the conversation and learn something new from it. You don’t have all the answers. Learn something new. 

So, whether it was me listening to a conservative person on the right or listening to a guerilla in El Salvador, listening to what they had to say and understanding that truth lives in every corner. Even though that can be on the left or right or wherever you are, that can be an anathema, it’s the only way to find the truth. It’s the only way to find out what’s really real. It’s to listen, and listen objectively to what people have to say and turn off your shit so you can hear it.

Did I say that word? Yes. I’m sorry.

MICHAEL FOX:  That’s awesome, Marc. I have a quote here from someone that I want to see if you can tell me what this means to you. George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

MARC STEINER:  Yeah.

MICHAEL FOX:  What does that quote mean to you? Why is that quote important right now?

MARC STEINER:  It’s one of my favorite statements because if you control the interpretation of what’s happened before, you control people’s understanding of why we’re here now and where we’re going. It’s a constant debate and battle. You can’t give up the struggle to control that. You have to fight for it all the time. You can’t let them define what it means to understand why we’re here, understand the struggles that brought us here and where we’re going to take them. But I think it’s a really critical thing. It’s just like the other one I said, listening. They’re both equal parts of understanding how you communicate and understand why we’re here and who you are.

And that’s why history is so important. When I first started out academically, I wanted to be a PhD in history because I needed to understand the past and the contradictions of the past. And understand the contradictions, you understand that nothing’s written in stone. Existence is struggle. It always has been, always will be. Utopian perfection is a great idea, but then pass me the joint [laughs]. 

So, I think that that concept is extremely critical to our understanding, which is why when you’re doing a program, when you’re interviewing people, you really have to step back. And everything you do is fueled by your own life. You can’t help that. But you have to step back and really listen to what people are saying so you can bring out their truth so others can wrestle with it. And if they need confronting in that process, you confront it and push back.

Which is why when I think about what we do and how important it is, we have a critical role to play in bringing understanding to the world. The truth lives in every corner and you have to listen. No one has a hold on it.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, is there anything else to add that you think is important about your time organizing, your time in theater, your time on the radio and its relationship to our right to speak up, our right to stand up, to speak our voice and to push for a better America?

MARC STEINER:  I go back in my head to what happened in the South and the Civil Rights Movement, which was a terrifying moment and a moment of absolute oppression. The battle for free speech that took place in the South, as I said earlier, there’s no mistake that the people who launched that battle on the West Coast were civil rights workers first and brought that idea and intellect to the movement. And we’re facing a moment again, and it’s a little different. I think we’re politically facing the most dangerous moment in my lifetime politically where the right is seizing power across the country and the racist right is seizing power.

And that now the battle for free speech is more critical than ever. We cannot let them take it away, and we have to stand up to that, tell the stories we have to tell, put it out there in every medium we can find and fight for the right to speak our minds which will be taken away from us if we don’t. That’s what we face right now. Trump is not the problem. It’s those around him that created this monster that are the problem. 

So, now from the street corner to work at Real News to other places around the country, this is where the critical work is being done. The right to speak our mind is a fundamental right in this country. We can’t let it go. We can’t let it be taken away. We can’t be pushed into a corner to fear standing up to tell the truth and to speak out.

This is Mario Savio and free speech movement on steroids, what we face at this moment. The reason that we started the underground newspapers in the ’60s where we had the Washington Free Press, where we had all the other papers around the country, was because we pushed free speech to its limits, which we had to. And we have to do it again.

Look, I’m old. Who knows, I mean, when you hit 80, you can be here a year, six months, 10 years, 15, who the fuck knows. Pardon my French again. But we have in this battle is to save this future for our children. We can’t let our freedom of speech be taken away from us. It’s at the heart of all of our freedoms. 

I did a lot of work writing and research years back on the founding fathers of this country and writing the Constitution. And it dovetailed, unknowingly to me at the moment, with my relationship with the Indigenous world. When you read some of the stuff from the 18th century, a lot of the belief in democracy did not just come from England or France, from right here, among the Iroquois, among the five civilized tribes that were the most democratic nations on the planet Earth just about. They’re the ones who taught the white colonies what it meant to be free, what it meant to be a democracy, and what it meant to let people speak their minds and say what they had to say without being ridiculed. 

And I think that’s an important lesson for us to learn that authoritarianism was brought to us by some crazy people from overseas in Europe and other places, but the fundamental basic fights for freedom are here, and they’re based on the fights [for] the abolition of slavery. All those are the roots of our freedom of speech. And we have to be really strong to stand up, to fight, and keep that freedom and push back the oppressors who are at the door.

MICHAEL FOX:  Amazing, Marc. Thank you so much, my friend.

MARC STEINER:  Always good to talk with you, man. I really love doing stuff with you.

MICHAEL FOX:  You too.

MARC STEINER:  It’s always great.

MICHAEL FOX:  It’s fantastic.

MARC STEINER:  Your work, everything else. Yeah. Always.

MICHAEL FOX:  Hi, folks. Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Michael Fox. That is all for The Battle for Free Speech. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode, and I hope you enjoyed this series. It’s been such an honor and a pleasure making it. Thank you so much for listening and caring about this podcast. You can show your support by subscribing, leaving a comment or a review in your podcasting app, and by telling a friend. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today.

Before I go, let me just say that we will be rolling out some incredible bonus episodes in the coming weeks. Please check those out. We’ll be bringing you some full interviews with people who I featured in this podcast as well as some more on-the-ground reporting which I just wasn’t able to fit into the official series.

If you’d like to find more about The Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting in the United States and across Latin America. You can find links to more of Marc Steiner’s work in the show notes or just search for The Marc Steiner Show. He has a ton of content out there from over his many years of journalism.

As this is the final episode of this series, I want to thank everyone who sat down with me over the last year and everyone who I spoke with on the streets. I am grateful for your insight, knowledge, and understanding. A huge thanks to all my supporters on Patreon and everyone who kicked in over the last year to help fund my reporting for this podcast and my other work. In particular, Judy Hughes and Michael and Mary Anne Fox. You are amazing. Many thanks to my musician friends, Jordan Klein and Daniel Nuñez who helped me to create the theme music for this series. Other music was from Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Many, many thanks to my intern and research assistant on this podcast, Ben Schweiger. He just graduated from the University of Colorado. If you are listening and you need research support, please hire him. His LinkedIn is in the show notes. 

To the team at The Real News, y’all are amazing. Tremendous thanks to Stephen Frank for his excellent sound design and production work. Huge thanks to Kayla Rivara, Max Alvarez, Jocelyn Dombroski, and also Heather Geis for your stellar editorial support. David Hebden and Cameron Granadino in the studio, you guys are amazing. Rosette Sewali, James Daley, and Ryan Johnson, thank you for everything online. Jonathan Keen, thanks for believing in my work and this project. 

In particular, I want to send a special shout out to my co-hosts who joined me over these episodes including Taya Graham, Mansa Musa, Max Alvarez, and Laura Flanders. It was incredible to speak with each of you. Thank you so much for taking the time and for all that you do. 

And above all else, thank you Marc Steiner for joining me on this endeavor. It’s been a pleasure to develop this idea into fruition, and it’s been an honor to work with you on this series. I’ve learned so much. 

The Battle for Free Speech is a production of The Real News. Please make sure to sign up for The Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. Thanks for listening. Please keep an eye out for those bonus episodes. See you next time.