Gregor Baszak

Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2017 WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP ANNOUNCED the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord on June 1, 2017, for many liberals it meant that doom was upon us, that the earth was surely soon to be uninhabitable. Yet, if the Paris Accord was the best shot that our civilization had at survival, we were perhaps doomed from the start. NASA scientist James Hansen, at least, one of the earliest voices to raise the alarms about the effects of climate change, had deemed the Accord to be thoroughly inadequate to begin with. [Read More]

New York: OR Books, 2016. “MY TWO CENTS’ WORTH – and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993–1994 – is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life… Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president. [Read More]

GREGOR BASZAK of the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted an interview with Cedric Johnson, author of From Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (2007). What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Stokely Carmichael lecturing on Pan-Africanism in the 1960s. Gregor Baszak: Most on the Left claim that the recent cases of police violence suffered by Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and others are racially motivated. [Read More]

ON FEBRUARY 17, 2015, Gregor Baszak and Spencer A. Leonard of the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted an interview with Adolph L. Reed, Jr., author of The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (1986), W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought (1997), and Stirrings in the Jug (1999). What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Spencer A. Leonard: At the beginning of the essay you recently published in Harper’s titled “Nothing Left” you write that the major period of the Left’s influence on the course of American politics was from the mid-1930s to the end of the Second World War. [Read More]