Contributing Writers

In the wake of the mass shooting at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday Republicans “want to see all the facts” before proposing any new gun legislation.

More than a thousand students rallied at the Tennessee state Capitol Thursday to demand gun control, just days after a mass shooting at a Nashville Christian elementary school where three adults and three 9-year-olds were killed. Republicans hold a supermajority in Tennessee’s Legislature and have loosened gun restrictions. We speak with Dr. Katrina Green, an emergency physician in Nashville who has lost patients to gun violence and joined in Thursday’s protest.

In an unprecedented move, a Manhattan grand jury voted Thursday to indict former President Donald Trump for hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign to hide an alleged affair, making Trump the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges.

We speak with journalist Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, about her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, which examines myths about individualism and self-reliance that underpin the U.S. economy and the inequality it fosters.

We speak with writer and filmmaker Jennifer Fox, whose 2018 movie The Tale dealt with childhood sexual abuse. She has now come forward to name her abuser. The film is a narrative memoir based in part on Fox’s own life experience about being abused by a coach as a young girl. While the main character is named Fox, the name of the abusive coach was fictionalized. Now Fox has revealed the man who abused her as Ted Nash, the legendary Olympic rower and coach who died in 2021.

We speak with Jaysin Saxton, one of the witnesses who testified at the Senate hearing Wednesday on Starbucks’ union-busting record. Saxton was a former Starbucks shift manager, fired after leading the union drive at a store in Augusta, Georgia. He tells Democracy Now! he and fellow workers were motivated to organize their store to address the “insane” working conditions, including understaffing and inconsistent schedules.

Just weeks after the National Labor Relations Board accused Starbucks of engaging in “egregious and widespread misconduct” to prevent employees from unionizing, the company’s longtime CEO Howard Schultz appeared before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Wednesday to answer questions. Committee Chair Bernie Sanders of Vermont grilled Schultz on the company’s union-busting record and demanded an end to retaliation against workers.

We continue to remember the lawyer and human rights activist Randall Robinson, the founder of the racial justice group TransAfrica, who died last week at age 81. Robinson was a leader in the U.S. movement against South African apartheid and was a prominent critic of U.S. policy in Haiti, including the U.S.-backed coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

We speak with journalist Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, about her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, which examines myths about individualism and self-reliance that underpin the U.S. economy and the inequality it fosters.

A bipartisan group of senators has introduced the RESTRICT Act, which would allow the federal government to potentially ban technology from countries the U.S. considers to be adversaries, including China. Last Thursday, congressmembers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during a five-hour hearing on the app’s ties to the Chinese government, its data practices and its effects on children’s mental health.

We go to Ciudad Juárez for an update on the fire that killed at least 38 men held at a Mexican immigration detention center just across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. Surveillance video from the jail shows guards walking away as flames spread inside the jail cells, making no effort to open the jail cells or help the migrants who were trapped.

We remember the human rights activist and lawyer Randall Robinson, the founder of TransAfrica, who died Friday at the age of 81. Robinson played a critical role in the anti-apartheid movement in the United States and was a prominent critic of U.S. policy in Haiti. In 2004, he helped expose the U.S. role in the coup that ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. We air excerpts from a 2013 interview Robinson did with Democracy Now! about his work.