There was no obvious moment when the torch passed during host Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Seymour Hersh on a recent live episode of Intercepted, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine one.
Raised by activist Catholic parents, Scahill took to political agitation himself at a young age, notably working as a student organizer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before dropping out in 1995. He hitchhiked east and spent a year working with the radical anti-war ex-priest Philip Berrigan at a religious community in Baltimore. A year later, he was one of 11 people arrested in Chicago (along with Chicago Seven figure David Dellinger and Andrew Hoffman, son of Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman) for protesting the imprisonment of Leonard Peltier, a leader of the American Indian Movement.
At the time I think he was planning on going to the seminary to be a priest. But long story short—my dad met my mom, and that definitely threw him off the tracks of the priesthood. They eventually settled in Milwaukee.
[content-1] Do you think that one side breeds the other? Does the authoritarianism fuel the radical tradition?
He talks about Chicago in a way that’s not a dog whistle—it’s a foghorn to say, “The black people with the guns? They’re the problem.” You can’t talk about why there is gun violence in Chicago without talking about the history of economic violence in the city. You can’t talk about the killing of unarmed young black men without talking about the way that black people were warehoused and stripped of any economic independence.
After Rahm announced that he’s not running again, I wrote that it might be a sign that the age of the neoliberal Democrat is on the wane in Chicago. Am I overreaching?
