The Good Fight, with Ben Wikler

Women and men who serve in uniform often face an enemy within their own ranks: sexual assault. In this story, newly remastered from The Good Fight's 5th episode in December 2013, we tell the story of survivor Trina McDonald as she went from enlistee to victim to survivor to fearless advocate, and how she joined forces with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand to take on the system that had failed her. Note: The Good Fight is on a summer hiatus, but will continue posting remastered reruns until we return with brand-new episodes. Happy summer!  

One monopoly to rule them all: Comcast's attempt to gobble up Time Warner threatened the very Internet as we know it. But one senator fought back.

Marine biologist Ayana Johnson has a plan to bring back the fish, one island at a time. To do it, she'll have to drink a lot of beer. http://tgf.fm/43

Spring is finally here. Daffodils dancing int he breeze, pollen collecting on car roofs, and the symphony of coughs filling the air. It's not just allergies that are making it hard to breathe. It's also coal. Ending coal fired power is the best weapon against the US's asthma epidemic. Host Ben Wikler checks in With Mary Anne Hitt, the Director of the Sierra Club's beyond Coal Campaign, about her recent victories. And Nick Rathod brings Ben up to speed ont he progress of the young but mighty State Innovation Exchange, Progressive's best weapon against the evil ALEC. Here comes the sun!

So much glory: Kickstarter triumph, new baby, and encore visits from three beloved guests. Sister Simone gets back on the nun bus; Shannon Watts faces down the NRA; and Garlin Gilchrist makes us all want to move to Detroit. http://tgf.fm/41

Co-founder Alicia Garza shares the story of how #BlackLivesMatter began—and how it became the rallying cry for a movement, ignited by tragedy, that is fighting for survival. http://tgf.fm/40 And back the show by Feb 5 here: http://tgf.fm/ks

Want more Good Fight magic in the world? This is the moment to help, at tgf.fm/ks. We're running a Kickstarter campaign to raise $100,000 for our second year of shows, and we're already halfway there—but if we don't raise $50,000 more in the next seven days, it all disappears.    Chip in now, and then read this special message from Ben Wikler: Seven reasons to back The Good Fight.        1. Our guests should be household names.   Frank Mugisha is the leading gay rights activist—in Uganda. Sister Simone Campbell is a powerhouse lobbyist... nun. Jose Antonio Vargas won his Pulitzer Prize at age 26, four years before he came out of the closet as undocumented.      Ai-jen Poo helped launch a nanny uprising. Garlin Gilchrist II is reversing the Detroit diaspora. And Larry Lessig is on a shoot-for-the-moon quest to kick big money out of politics.    They're just a few of the amazing people we've been lucky enough to introduce to our listeners. There are so many more out there. Some are well-known already. All of them should be.    If you believe that more people should learn about heroes like these, click here to backThe Good Fight.   2. We're doing something no one else is doing.   This isn't talk radio, and it isn't NPR. We don't rant, we don't pretend every argument is equally valid, and we don't obsess over horse-race minutia.   For us, politics isn't a game. But it is insanely fun. Battles for justice are the greatest stories on earth. They're like The Princess Bride: full of, as the grandfather put it, "fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes... True love! Miracles!"   On The Good Fight, we interview genuine heroes winning fights that matter. Then we take those interviews, edit like crazy, stir in original music, narration, and archival audio—and craft spellbinding real-life David vs Goliath radio stories, told from the behind-the-slingshot point of view. And then we ask our listeners to get involved.    It's a new kind of mission-driven media—but it will only continue if enough of us chip in. Can you help?   3. A golden age of podcasts is dawning. A huge new audience awaits.   Every week, nine out of ten Americans listen to the radio. That's no surprise: radio is uniquely intimate. We've all had "driveway moments"—when you're sitting in your car, right outside your house, unable to move until the story on the radio is done.    Now it's moving online. Suddenly, America is discovering that podcasts—radio shows on the Internet—can be just as powerful. Thanks to Serial, iPhones, and connected cars, millions of people are tuning in to podcasts for the first time.    The question now is whether podcasts can become, for progressives, the answer to what conservatives did with talk radio in the last century.    This is the moment I've been dreaming of. The moment I've been preparing for.    I can't seize it without your help. Can you support the show? 4. People love The Good Fight.    Here's what they're saying:  "Refreshingly anti-cynical... expertly produced and presented... a welcome reminder that news doesn't always have to be bad." – The Telegraph "Beautiful, wrenching, and amazing" – Prof. Lawrence Lessig  "At first, I was skeptical – it reminded me of the hundreds of activist emails piled up in my inbox. But this show, I quickly found, is no guilt trip. It's funny and stimulating... It's great." - The Guardian "Best of 2013" – Apple "★★★★★" – 437 reviewers on iTunes "Exciting! How do you get it to play?" – My mom We hit a million downloads in our first year. In case you haven't heard the show, or haven't tuned in for a while, we've posted excerpts right here on the Kickstarter page. And if enough of us join in, a lot more great ones are coming soon.   5. You've seen our mind…

For decades, corporations have found Republicans ready to do their bidding thanks to a shadowy outfit known as ALEC. But Nick Rathod, a preacher's son, has a plan to fight back. http://tgf.fm/39

Zach Wahls, as a teenage Eagle Scout, gave a speech that changed the nation. If you ever clicked the headline "Two lesbians had a baby, and this is what they got," that speech was what you got—a speech that shifted the way millions of people thought about marriage equality. But as it turned out, that speech was just his warm-up act. On the latest Good Fight, Zach Wahls tell his extraordinary story—a tale of family, growing up, and a David-and-Goliath struggle to rescue the soul of a great American institution.

Mayday SuperPAC, Lawrence Lessig's anti-corruption moonshot, lost nearly all of its races in the 2014 midterms. Does that mean it failed? Or does the shadow of money in politics extend beyond mere wins and losses? Professor Lessig and the Progressive Campaign Change Committee's Adam Green take us behind the vote tally and into the heart of the campaign-finance darkness for part 3 of The Good Fight's Mayday 2014 trilogy. http://tgf.fm/37

2014 was the election that young people were supposed to ignore. But then came the voting anthem nobody can stop humming. Today on The Good Fight, the inside story of Turn Out For What—as recounted by Rock The Vote's Ashley Spillane and Dan McSwain, and featuring the voices of Lil Jon, Lena Dunham, Fred Armisen, and Whoopi Goldberg. It's the electoral viral mega-hit of the year, 10 million views strong, exactly when we need it most.  See the video at http://tgf.fm/36, help turn out voters at moveon.org/calls, and remember to vote on November 4! 

Conservatives might have money, but progressives have something even more powerful: science. That's right: gigantic, statistically valid, scientifically rigorous experiments about the best way to win elections.  If that's a surprise to you, there's a reason: the most fascinating experiments are all being kept secret. And that's by design. This isn't academia, where the goal is the pursuit of truth. This is politics--where once the other side learns what you've figured out, knowledge stops being power. At the heart of the progressive electoral-scientific revolution is a little low-profile outfit called The Analyst Institute. It stays away from the media. But today, its Executive Director Tate Hausman emerges from the labs to fill Good Fight listeners in on some of the most crucial findings of the political data wizards—just in time for us to put the lessons to good use in 2014 to help save the Senate.  Ever heard the phrase "the states are the laboratories of democracy"? Well, it's out of date. These days, the whole country's one big lab, and we're all test subjects. And thank goodness: science plus people power is our last, best hope to beat the billionaires. 

Why haven't wages risen in 40 years? It's not just bad luck. The mostly invisible, ultra-powerful folks who run at the Federal Reserve have gone to great lengths to keep it that way. When too many people get jobs, when pay starts going up... wham! They knock things back down again.  But lately, things have been a little different. The financial crisis jolted the Fed into superhero mode—and Janet Yellen, the new boss, seems determined to make the economy work for regular people. Trouble is, the old guard's not happy about it. What's needed is another jolt, a fresh infusion of real-world voices. And now, an unlikely group of outsiders is stepping up to provide it.  Meet Action United's Kendra Brooks, the AFL CIO's Damon Silvers, and the Center for Popular Democracy's Ady Barkan—and go inside what might be the wonkiest and most important economic-justice fight of the year. Or the decade. http://tgf.fm/34

They promised the biggest climate march in world history. But when the big morning arrived, the Weather app showed a thundercloud.  Hear what happened next—and feel the (renewable) energy of a giant, urgent movement hitting the streets together for the first time—as The Good Fight takes you inside the most ambitious grassroots mobilization of the year.

The killing of Michael Brown, and the military-style police crackdown that followed, exposed millions of Americans to the wide-open Pandora's Box that is the American way of law enforcement. In the weeks since, as the nation wrestled with fundamental questions of race and justice, media across the country have alighted on what seems like an easy answer: just put cameras on the police! Turns out, it might actually be a great idea. Not because it solves everything, or even because it generates world-changing footage.  In fact, as it turns out, the least important thing about body-worn police cameras is the stuff that actually gets recorded. But body cameras have a way of changing the way people behave, on both sides of the lens. Professor David Harris and community organizer Terrance Stone join us, in the wake of Ferguson, to examine the science and practice of a gizmo that could save more lives than the Apple Watch. http://tgf.fm/32