Advertise on podcast: Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

“Poets,” Stanley Kunitz writes, “are not easily domesticated… and they can be outrageous; but they are also idealists and visionaries whose presence is needed… to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, and to challenge [spiritual] apathy.” Poets, yes, and teachers and librarians along with citizens and artists of every stripe and kind. Everyone is invited to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, to challenge apathy, leaning into the never-ending pursuit of new knowledge, novel insights, the complex, fugitive concept, “truth,” and the right to think at all. We’re remembering the brilliant artist, writer, and film-maker Marjane Satrapi who lived her life fighting for freedom in her native Iran as well as internationally—she “died of sadness” a few weeks ago, and we join legions of her admirers and comrades-in-arms in mourning her passing. Persepolis, her acclaimed comic book/memoir of a childhood and adolescence during and after the Islamic Revolution, was banned again and again in multiple venues. When a Texas state representative recently released a list of 850 books---including Persepolis—and advised school libraries to report whether they had any of the titles on his list, a school district in San Antonio removed more than 400 books. And when the McMinn County school board voted unanimously to ban the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from the school’s classrooms and library, a Tennessee pastor organized a book burning, live-streamed on Facebook, where books with “demonic influences”—including Persepolis— were fed to the flames. As Governors and Senators join the troglodyte choir, it becomes increasingly clear that as terrible as banning Marjane Satrapi or Art Spiegelman is in itself, the larger target is any third-grade teacher or high school English teacher anywhere in the country. The main victims of this galloping censorship are children and youth, of course, but it’s important to note that while truth-telling can and is being banned in schools by state legislators and local boards, it’s a wide, wide world out there, and repression activates resistance. Neither kids nor teachers are simply one-dimensional victims of ignorant policies. Teachers are launching Banned Books Clubs and after-school local history study groups at high schools around the country, and the message is clear: you need no one’s permission to interrogate the world. We’re joined by Jarrett Dapier, a librarian and champion of the right of free people to read freely, and the author of Wake Now in the Fire, a fictionalized graphic account of a series of true events when a community—teachers, students, and parents in Chicago—fought for and won the right to read Persepolis.

Debt is everywhere, and its demands are boundless—debt demands repayment, of course, and it typically demands interest on top of that. But debt’s visible and obvious demands are just the beginning. Debt’s sticky, spidery web demands, as well, fear and anxiety, distrust and dishonesty, guilt and shame—it demands insecurity and precariousness. The demands are financial, of course, and personal, but also psychological, cultural, political, and existential. We’ re joined by Kristin Collier, author of What Debt Demands:Family Betrayal and Precarity in a Broken System, part memoir and part research from the ground—a compelling journey through the matrix that debt has woven, and a vision of what it would mean to be bound to one another rather than to the state or to the banks.

Colleges and universities—and all educational institutions—are natural sites of struggle over fundamental questions: what knowledge and experiences are of most value? Who should have access to that valuable knowledge? What is the truth about this or that, and what’s the evidence? Where do we come from and what we hope to be? These questions are messy, full of conflict, even dangerous, and universities are both venues to discuss ideas, and stages where we put those ideas into practice, arguing and contending over the meaning of history, class, race, religion, gender, sexuality, and every other aspect of what it means to be fully human. We’re joined by labor historian Tom Alter, a tenured professor at Texas State University who was summarily fired this year for his political beliefs, and who is engaged in a fight about the right to think at all---a struggle that has implications for all of us.

The US school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives. Join Eve L. Ewing and Bill Ayers at a season of the Socialism 2025 conference for a discussion of the historical origins of white supremacy and racial hierarchy baked into the DNA of American schooling.

We know what the authoritarian vision of education and schooling is—it’s laid out in detail in Project 2025: an end to public education, taxpayer funding for religious and private schools, teachers reduced to clerks, and students as indistinguishable widgets moving along an assembly line as bits of information are poured into their upturned heads. For decades there’s been a relentless campaign to define education in instrumentalist, linear, and expedient terms, and high-stakes standardized tests have been a common cudgel in the hands of the powerful, a kind of modern and scientized eugenics device. Simultaneously, the marketeers have organized a fire-sale, relentlessly selling off our public assets to private interests. All of this activity undermines the nature of intellectual inquiry and cognitive growth, transforming education into a matter of consumption, competition, and a hierarchy of winners and losers; the result is the eclipse of the public, the demolition of the commons, and the destruction of authentic learning. Join Bill in conversation with Jared Rock and Mike Schuwerk as they discuss their own North Star: Educational Humanism in a Post-Managerial Age, a liberatory alternative to the devastating dystopia we’re living through.

What’s happening? How did we get here? Where are we on the clock of the world? And where do we go from here? Today—and everyday—we need to ask ourselves deep and fundamental questions in order to continue to develop a dynamic and concrete analysis of concrete conditions—a guide to resistance and action. Surrender is not an option, and living in a perpetual defensive crouch is never the way forward. No. In the words of the legendary organizer Ella Baker, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” In June, 2026 Bill met up with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at Haymarket House for a wide-ranging conversation about this political moment and what the known demands of us now. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a MacArthur Fellow and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the co-founder of Hammer & Hope, a magazine of Black politics and culture, and author of several books: Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.

Fugitives are on the run—not free yet, they are running and running hard…running toward freedom. Refugees have escaped war or catastrophic climate collapse or extreme social disintegration, and forced to flee their homes, compelled to confront a fresh landscape, they invent new ways of living, learning, loving, and being—on the run. Walter Riley is a long-distance runner—he’s been in the mix and on the move for eight decades. A refugee from the Jim Crow South where as a teenager he was a renowned organizer and activist, and at 19 moderated a conversation with Malcolm X in Durham, NC, Walter Riley is a civil rights attorney in Oakland, California, winner of the National Lawyers Guild’s Champion of Justice Award, and a founder of Haiti Emergency Relief (visit Episode #38 where Walter is in conversation about Haiti with our Beloved late comrade Malik Alim). Walter Riley is a fugitive from our soul-crushing racial capitalist system, and a powerful revolutionary thinker and strategist. His son Boots Riley says that his dad teaches us that “we must participate, we must engage, we must seek to change the world.” In motion and in action we will develop our thinking and figure out with more clarity “how to fight, how to live, how to love…” Arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder, heart-to-heart, Walter Riley returns to “Under the Tree” for a discussion of movement-building in this political moment as well as his new book (with Jesse Strauss and a Foreword by Boots), Civil Rights and Structural Attacks.

We're delighted to be joined—again—by Mark Nowak, a labor activist, organizer, legendary teacher, and prize-winning poet, who is the founding director of the Worker Writers School. I've participated in sessions at the School several times, and the joy and energy that explodes into the room is striking as domestic workers, cab drivers, miners, and other workers embrace and display their intellectual and creative talents. Adrienne Rich praised Nowak for "regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature." Here we discuss AGAIN, his photo-text commentary on MAGA, touching on mass incarceration, school shootings, environmental collapse, white nationalism, and war.

Anarchy is community gardens and potluck dinners, playgrounds and art classes, friends and family in the foreground, and dancing wildly on the ruins of a system that was killing us. Anarchy is spontaneous cooperation without coercion, mutuality and reciprocity, tolerance for confusion, contingency, improvisation, dialogue and debate, experimentation, spontaneity, and the flux that accompanies constant social learning. Anarchy is embracing the cosmic dream boogie and a freedom we’ve never tasted. Anarchy is free people doing all the things that free people do, and respecting other free people doing everything that free people do. We're in conversation with Jessica Lawless, author of Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent, a moving account of abolitionist feminist resistance excavated from their decades of organizing and activism.

Nancy Kurshan invented a robust, creative, and riotous Movement life. From the early days of the Black Freedom Movement and the anti-war struggles against the US invasion of Vietnam, through the Chicago 8 Conspiracy trial, radical solidarity with Puerto Rican independence and Palestinian liberation, and her feminist insistence on speaking up and being heard, Nancy Kurshan is an extraordinary and wise woman. She was a Red Diaper baby, raised as a child of the communist movement, a veteran of demonstrations for racial equality and against nuclear arms while still in high school. Nancy Kurshan was a founding member of the Yippies—the Youth International Party—engaged in wholesale disruption and widespread resistance as well as ridiculing the kings who had no clothes and dramatizing the hypocrisy of the war mongers, the rulers, and the captains of capitalism. She is the author of Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories, and we’re excited to be joined in conversation with her at Pilsen Community Books.

Israel and its sponsor, enabler, and co-conspirator, the United States, extends it’s Forever War against Palestine and Palestinians, doubling-down on the genocide in Gaza, escalating ethnic-cleansing in the West Bank, and igniting fresh conflicts in Lebanon and Iran. The madness grows as war fever sweeps the region, and Israel sets itself on a suicidal path. We’re joined at Pilsen Community Books for a public conversation about war, peace, art, history, and resistance with our friends and comrades Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American historian and the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine and Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness; and Ismail Khalidi, a Palestinian/Lebanese American playwright, screenwriter theater director, and author of Tennis in Nablus, Truth Serum Blues, and a critically-acclaimed adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani's novella, Returning to Haifa---work that tackles the history of Palestine and the modern Middle East, as well as wider themes of race, colonialism, displacement and war.

In the late 1960s Detroit was ripe for revolution: a wave of urban insurrections had swept the country from coast to coast, and the 1967 Detroit rebellion was one of the largest and most consequential; Black auto workers who had experienced marginalization and discrimination in the industry as well as from their own union (UAW) were organizing grass roots resistance; and Detroit was a center of Black radical thought, notably fired by the presence of the Marxist leader CLR James, as well as James and Grace Lee Boggs. On May 2, 1968, 3000 workers at the massive Dodge Main plant participated in a wildcat strike, and soon the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) was born, and workers began organizing radical caucuses at other factories. There are several useful accounts—books, articles, films—about the life of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, its history and its impact, but with Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries Walda Katz-Fischman and Jerome Scott add a necessary and illuminating element: Oral History. The focus is meaning as it’s constructed by human beings—meaning made by actors in their particular situations—and this leads to story, to narrative, to approaches that are person-centered, shamelessly interpretive, and unapologetically subjective. Far from a weakness, the voice of the person—the narrator’s own account—is the singular achievement of this work, a worthy antidote to propaganda, dogma, imposition, and stereotype.

We are living through difficult times, tough times, and we’re not alone. Genocide, catastrophic capitalist climate collapse, increasing inequality, unapologetic imperial dreams and white supremacist policies unleashed, fascism on the rise—people all over the world are suffering, they get hurt and they get hard. Our rage and our sadness for all the unnecessary suffering, while understandable, can easily lead to despair and worse. But despair is deactivating, distorting, and destructive—a weapon of the powerful. Activism is a necessary antidote to despair, and activism opens a practical space where hope can come alive. Join us in conversation with one of the most joyful freedom fighters we know: Vijay Prashad, director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—a primer about everything that matters! Vijay is the author of forty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of Global South, and (with Grieve Chelwa) How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa. He is an editor at LeftWord Books (New Delhi), Inkani Books (Johannesburg), and La Trocha (Santiago).

Once again the US is at war in the Middle East, and once again the “coalition of the willing” is Israel standing alone, hand-in-bloody-hand with the US. If history is a guide, when the US boot comes down, freedom and humanity are not the winners. The autocratic and sclerotic regime in Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of protestors in recent months, and the murderous medieval rulers of that land were widely reviled and resisted by their own people. During the protests, and now with the war, desperation, rage, sadness, fear, and uncertainty characterize the reaction of many Iranians of good will, both in-country and in the diaspora. We dive into the contradictions and begin the agonizing process of sifting through the wreckage with Sepehr Vakil, an associate professor of Learning Sciences in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, and an engaged scholar/activist, author of Revolutionary Engineers: Learning, Politics, and Activism at Aryamehr University of Technology.

Power habitually lies in public to make a particularly egregious point: We can lie in public, and you can’t stop us. “We didn’t murder that protester, she was a domestic terrorist determined to kill police;” “I strangled that Black man to death because I feared for my life.” The debate over whether the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank is indeed a genocide is a fraudulent diversion—the genocide was pre-announced by government leaders in October, 2023: “We will starve them; we will deny them medicines and fuels; we will make Gaza uninhabitable.” The so-called ceasefire is also a ruse, a phony attempt to change the international narrative while continuing to murder, drive out, and erase the population. We’re joined in conversation with Nell and Leta Hirschmann-Levy, two brave and intrepid sisters from New York City whose opposition to the US/Israeli genocide in Palestine has led them to picket lines, boycotts, rallies, organizing campaigns, and to Palestine itself.