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Say No to Inhumane, Illegal War on Venezuela; and Jan. 6th Attack Five Years Later

Details: Published: 06 January 2026

Out-FM show aired on Tues., January 6, 2026

Press play to stream show or green down arrow to download mp3 file.

Say No to the Inhumane, Illegal War on Venezuela

https://threewayfight.org/caution-doesnt-make-us-safe-a-review-of-pras-report-on-the-maga-movement/

Ricardo Julio Sanchez, Venezuelan LGBT activist

In this segment, we offer some information you may not hear elsewhere about the U.S. government’s outrageous attack on Venezuela, including the kidnapping of its president and another senior political leader that caused 60 deaths, including those of 32 Cubans, and about the devastating impact of economic sanctions on the population. The Trump administration has engaged in a huge propaganda blitz, so here is a different view, followed by parts of an earlier Out-FM segment from a gay Venezuelan perspective.

First, we’ll hear an article written Saturday by Michelle Ellner, the Latin America Campaign Coordinator at CODEPINK, a feminist grassroots organization working to end U.S. warfare and imperialism. Ms. Ellner begins by referring to Trump’s announcement on Saturday about the military attack and kidnapping.

Write your Congressional representatives here asking them to support the War Powers Resolution on Venezuela.

Next, we think it's important to play excerpts of an Out-FM interview about Venezuela from our archive, recorded in 2019. Many of the issues are still relevant today. Out-FM's John Riley interviewed Ricardo Julio Sanchez, a representative of a consortium of Venezuelan LGBT activist groups that came with the Venezuelan delegation to the United Nations. John asked him about the impact of the trade embargo on people as a whole and people with HIV/AIDS in particular and about their healthcare system.

Thanks to former WBAI Producer William Camacaro for assistance setting up the interview and to vice-minister of foreign relations for North America Carlos Ron Martinez, for translating this interview.

More Information on Venezuela:

Telesur English - TV news service for progressive people in Latin America established by Venezuela

Tune in for ongoing live TV and text coverage of Venezuela.

Democracy Now - Tune in to their website or on your local radio or TV station, weekdays any time beginning at 8 AM ET for updates.video & transcript.

Venezuelan Communes - Building People Power (30-minute video documentary, 2025)

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Five Years After the Far-Right January 6th

Capitol Attack

Matthew Lyons, analyst of the Far Right

Five years ago, on January 6th, 2021, a mob of 2,000 to 5,000 people, some of them armed, stormed the U.S. Capitol building following Trump's "Stop the Steal Rally" seeking to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden's electoral victory as president-elect. Speakers included several Republican Congressmembers. The rioters were responding to repeated inflammatory calls by Trump in the preceding weeks to come to DC for what he said would be a "wild" day of action. During or shortly after the riot, seven people died, including one protester shot by police, one police officer died, two committed suicide shortly thereafter, and at least 178 officers were injured. Many people including journalists were assaulted by the rioters by pepper spray, bear spray, and other weapons.

Organizing groups included the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, both far-right militia groups, as well as the New Apostalic Reformation, a right-wing Christian supremacist network. (The Oath Keepers entered the Capitol building in a military-style “stack” formation.) While a small number of people of color were among the rioters, the vast majority were white and followed one stripe or another of racist ideology, including some Neo-Confederates. Less publicized is that several of the organizing groups also had misogynist and anti-queer philosophies.

Only after several hours did the police clear the Capitol of the rioters and begin arresting them. Ultimately over 1500 people were charged and convicted, serving months and in some cases years in prison. But on Donald Trump's first day in office the second time a year ago, he granted all of them -- including those convicted of violent crimes -- clemency, and freed all those still in prison. We'll speak with far-right analyst Matthew Lyons about the forces who brought this about, five years later.

Matthew N. Lyons has been writing about right-wing politics for over 30 years. He writes regularly for the radical antifascist website Three Way Fight, and his work has also appeared in a number of other leftist and mainstream publications. He is co-editor of the book Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism (2024) and author of Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right's Challenge to State and Empire (2018). He lives in Philadelphia.

More information by Matthew Lyons and others:

Three Way Fight: Against Fascism, Against the State, For a Free Humanity

Contains many writings by Matthew Lyons.

Most recent (1/1/26 - highly recommended):

Cracks in the Foundation: Heritage and Ruling Class Strategy

Caution doesn’t make us safe: A review of PRA’s* report on the MAGA movement

* PRA = Political Research Associates

Matthew N Lyons - February 17, 2022

The Anti-Nazi White Rose's Hidden Gay Co-founder

Details: Published: 29 December 2025

Out-FM show aired on Tues., December 30, 2025

Press play to stream show or green down arrow to download mp3 file.

Click here to see the video of the interview.

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The Anti-Nazi White Rose's Hidden Gay Co-founder

The White Rose's Sophie Scholl (center) bids farewell to her brother Hans (left) and friend Christoph Probst (right) before their departure for the Eastern Front in July 1942. Credit: George Wittenstein

Hans Scholl (colorized photo)

Dr. Jud Newborn

With the rise of far-right governments in this country and worldwide hurtling toward a latter-day racist and anti-queer fascism, it’s all the more urgent to study important forms of anti-fascism from the past. One such example is from Nazi Germany, the clandestine resistance group called The White Rose.

We spend the hour with Dr. Jud Newborn, an anthropologist who has analyzed all forms of Nazism and the Holocaust, and is also one of the world’s foremost historians of the White Rose. He has particularly focused on their most celebrated members, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, and helped bring to light that Hans was a gay man prosecuted for homosexuality years before he helped form the White Rose. Here are some excerpts from his writing:

The White Rose’s core consisted of six University of Munich students and a philosophy professor. All but one were executed in 1943 by guillotine within days of their arrest. At the time, Sophie was 21 and Hans was 24. A loose network of supporters and sympathetic acquaintances aided in distributing leaflets and providing money to purchase supplies.

Today, Hans and Sophie Scholl are celebrated as pivotal members of the White Rose. They joined the activist network after becoming disillusioned with the Hitler Youth, in which they were both leaders as teenagers. Castigating the German middle class for abandoning its Christian values and leadership roles, the White Rose set out to rouse the masses from their “slumber” and encourage effective passive resistance against the fascist regime.

A quote from a White Rose leaflet: “Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be ‘governed’ without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.”

By all accounts, the White Rose activists were among the first within Germany to speak out widely against the mass murder of Jews, in their second leaflet in June 1942. Their legendary distribution of flyers at the University of Munich appears to have been the only fundamentally political public protest against Nazism to be staged by Germans during the 12 years of Adolf Hitler’s rule. The last words of the group’s fourth leaflet became its legacy: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!” The Allies later dropped these leaflets all over the Third Reich.

Eighty years after their executions, the leaders of the White Rose are counted among the greatest Germans of all time. Numerous schools, streets and plazas are named for them, and monuments honoring their activism appear throughout the country. They have been the subject of plays, documentaries, feature films, and even two operas.

Yet two mysteries about the White Rose long bedeviled laypeople and scholars alike:

What motivated the 1937 transformation of the teenaged Hans and Sophie from fanatical acolytes of Nazism to passionate anti-Nazis?
Why did Hans and his friends choose the “White Rose” as the name associated with their resistance organization?

The answers to these two questions appear to be interwoven. According to previously ignored Gestapo interrogation transcripts, along with my own subsequent research – writes Dr. Jud Newborn – anti-gay Nazi policies played a pivotal role in the radicalization of the Scholl siblings, helping to turn them into exemplars of civil courage.

Our guest is Dr. Jud Newborn, a pioneer in the creation of modern Holocaust museums, who served as Founding Historian of New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage. Dr, Newborn is an acclaimed multimedia storyteller, lecturer, author and two-time Emmy Award winner, who has presented his programs coast-to-coast, at the United Nations, and from Canada to Cape Town. He is co-author of the now classic book, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, which has been reprinted repeatedly, most recently in the updated 80th anniversary edition of 2023, and has been translated into many languages. He has also written for The New York Times, Jerusalem Post and Smithsonian Magazine among other leading publications. He is also a longtime member of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association or NLGJA. Dr. Newborn was honored in 2018 with the prestigious Spirit of Anne Frank Human Writes Award. Jud Newborn today is the Producer of Special Guest Programs for Long Island's Cinema Arts Centre, which for years has been a solid supporter of WBAI. Click here to see the video of the interview.

Smithsonian article by Dr. Jud Newborn:

Hitler Youth Leaders. Why Did They Decide to Stand Up to the Nazis?

Dr. Jud Newborn performs five dramatic, richly multimedia storytelling programs worldwide, including his most popular "The White Rose Resistance - and Heroes Today in the Fight for Democracy and Human Rights.” He is also co-producing his second Holocaust-themed animated film, “Hidden Light,” with an award-winning team.

More at www.judnewborn.com.

Stay tuned to Out-FM in a few weeks for the final piece of Pauline’s and our interview with Jud Newton about the overall Nazi policy toward lesbians and gay men, as well as other inspirational examples of queer resisters to fascism through Europe during World War II. Join our e-newsletter for the date of that segment - sign up at outfm.org. You may also want to check out John Riley’s two-part 2022 Out-FM interview with Professor Laurie Marhoefer of the University of Washington about her book, Sex and Weimar Germany: Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. To hear that, click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

To add a note of context to the White Rose interview: While the accomplishments of the small White Rose group in Munich were remarkable, it should also be remembered that there were several other resistance groups inside Nazi Germany during this period, including within the Jewish community. And even after the regime largely wiped them out in the mid 1930s, the Social Democratic and Communist Parties maintained underground resistance movements.

Music:

Marlene Dietrich, "Lili Marleen"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y-DABC8sAc

Lotte Lenya, "Die Morität von Mackie Messer" (Mack the Knife)

(from "Die Dreigroschenoper" of Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht) (The Threepenny Opera)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7eO7MKEZAY&list=RDX7eO7MKEZAY&start_radio=1

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ANNOUNCEMENT: Out-FM’s Pauline Park will be part of the panel during WBAI’s Special Live Coverage of the Inauguration of NYC Mayor Mamdani – that’s this Thursday, January 1st from 11 am to 3 pm.

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Say No to Inhumane, Illegal War on Venezuela; and Jan. 6th Attack Five Years Later

Out-FM show aired on Tues., January 6, 2026

The Anti-Nazi White Rose's Hidden Gay Co-founder

Out-FM show aired on Tues., December 30, 2025