On August 17, 2023, Platypus Affiliated Society members Erin Hagood and Evan Rodgers interviewed Benjamin Studebaker, a political theorist and author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut (2023) as well as the forthcoming Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies. An edited transcript follows.
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ON APRIL 17, 2024, the students of Columbia University’s “Apartheid Divest” coalition, led by Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, erected an encampment, a “liberated zone” with posters copied straight from the Columbia occupation of 1968. As this encampment began, Columbia’s President Shafik was sitting before congress to testify about the rise of antisemitism on college campuses. When she returned to campus, President Shafik ordered the destruction of the encampments and the arrest of over 100 student protesters.
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STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY (SDS) was founded in 1960 as a transformation of the student wing of LID (League for Industrial Democracy). The social democratic inheritors of Walter Lipman’s Intercollegiate Socialist Society, LID had banned Communists from its organization in the 1940s and had a close relationship to organized labor in America.
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On December 7, 2020, Erin Hagood and Duyminh Tran interviewed Angela Davis via Zoom. Davis is a political activist, author, and academic whose work has focused on issues on race, class, and feminism. What follows is an edited version of their discussion.
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On June 4, 2018 Stephanie Gomez and Erin Hagood of the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted an interview with David McReynolds. The interview was broadcast on an episode of “Radical Minds” on WHPK 88.5-FM Chicago. David McReynolds was a key figure in the Socialist and Pacifist movements in the United States throughout his life. He passed shortly after this interview was conducted in his apartment in New York. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.
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