In Berkeley Talks episode 211, Bradley Onishi, a scholar of religion, an ex-evangelical minister and the co-host of the politics podcast Straight White American Jesus, discusses Project 2025, Christian nationalism and the November elections.

“Project 2025 is a deeply reactionary Catholic vision for the country,” said Onishi, who gave the 2024 Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance on Oct. 1. “It's a Christian nationalism fueled by Catholic leaders, and in many cases, reactionary Catholic thought.”

Many see Trump’s vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance, a first-term senator from Ohio, as bolstering Trump’s outsider image, said Onishi. But it has gone mostly unnoticed that Vance is a radical religious politician, even more so than former Vice President Mike Pence.

“Vance's Catholicism has barely registered as a driving factor in his political profile, and yet it serves as an interpretive key for understanding why Vance was chosen and how he brings a populist radicalism to a potential second Trump presidency — and a direct link to Project 2025,” he said.

The UC Berkeley event was sponsored by the Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Social Science Matrix and the Center for Right-Wing Studies.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2011, mass protests erupted in Syria against the four-decade authoritarian rule of the Assad family. The uprising, which became part of the larger pro-democracy Arab Spring that spread through much of the Arab world, was met with a brutal government crackdown.

Soon after, the country descended into a devastating civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians and displaced over 13 million people, more than half of the country’s prewar population.

When the civil war broke out, groups of volunteers formed to provide emergency response to communities across Syria. In 2014, those volunteers voted to form the Syria Civil Defence, a national humanitarian organization widely known as the White Helmets. Since then, the group has expanded to become a nearly 3,000-strong network that has saved more than 128,000 lives in Syria.

In their daring and life-threatening work, the White Helmets provide critical emergency services, including medical care, ambulances and search-and-rescue operations. They also document military attacks and coordinate with NGOs in pursuit of justice and accountability for the Syrian people.

In Berkeley Talks episode 210, we hear from the director of the White Helmets, Raed al-Saleh, and from Farouq Habib, a founding member of the organization who serves as their deputy general manager for external affairs. They were part of a panel discussion hosted by Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center on Sept. 19, 2024.

“For us, as Syrian people, the most strategic and important work is on justice and accountability, our human rights work,” said al-Saleh, whose remarks were translated by Habib during the event.

The group has become instrumental in exposing human rights violations and atrocities during the war. After they used GoPro cameras to record a double-tap strike in 2015 — when two strikes are launched in quick succession, often targeting civilians or first responders — the White Helmets recognized that the videos could be used to document these war crimes.

“We realized that the footage … is not only important for media awareness and quality assurance, but it’s even more important to document the atrocities and the violations of international human rights law and how to use that in the future to pursue accountability.”

When asked later in the discussion how the White Helmets envision the future of Syria, al-Saleh replied that they want to see “a peaceful Syria, where people can live with dignity and respect to human rights and support human rights everywhere.”

Habib and al-Saleh were joined on the panel by Andrea Richardson, a senior legal researcher for investigations at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center, and emergency physician and medical adviser Rohini Haar, a Berkeley Law lecturer and a research fellow at the Human Rights Center. The discussion was moderated by Andrea Richardson, executive director of the Human Rights Center.

Learn more about Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center.

Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of the White Helmets.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 209, renowned legal scholars Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, and Nadine Strossen, professor emerita of the New York School of Law and national president of the ACLU from 1991 to 2008, discuss free speech challenges facing universities today. They covered topics including hate speech, First Amendment rights, the Heckler’s Veto, institutional neutrality and what steps universities can take to avoid free speech controversies.

The conversation, which took place on Sept. 11, was held in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, in which thousands of students protested successfully for their right to free political speech at UC Berkeley. Instead of having a moderator, the speakers were given a list of questions they posed to each other, and took turns answering them.

At one illuminating moment, Chemerinsky asked Strossen what steps she might take to reduce the harmful effects of polarized political speech on campus.

“I think that punishment is not an effective way to change somebody's attitudes,” Strossen answered, “which is what we are concerned about, especially in an educational environment. Treating somebody like a criminal or even shaming, shunning and ostracizing them is not likely to open their hearts and minds. So I think it is as ineffective as a strategy for dealing with discrimination as it is unjustified and consistent with First Amendment principles.

“But there are a lot of things that universities can and should do — and I know from reading about your campus, that you are doing … It's gotten justified nationwide attention.”

Strossen went on to emphasize the importance of education, not only in free speech principles, but in other civic principles, as well, like the history of discrimination and anti-Semitism.

Beyond education, Strossen said, “universities have to show support for members of the community who are the targets of hateful speech by raising their own voices, but also by providing psychological and other counseling and material kinds of support.”

The event was sponsored by HxA Berkeley and Voices for Liberty, of George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School. It was co-sponsored by Berkeley Law’s Public Law and Policy program, the Berkeley Liberty Initiative and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Screenshot of HxA Berkeley video.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.