876: Bigger Than Me
This American Life
This American Life
4.6 • 88.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When history comes knocking, you have to figure out what to do.
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- Prologue: Brittany’s job is to answer anonymous calls and texts from people in the military. This year, she’s gotten more than usual–most of them are wondering about what to do with orders they’ve been given. Or orders they’re afraid they’ll get someday in the future. (9 minutes)
- Act One: Jad Abumrad tells the story of the "ideological genealogy” of Fela Kuti’s anti-colonial politics–his mother. In late 1940s Nigeria, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti found herself at the center of a big, historical moment: an uprising led by thousands of women selling goods in Nigeria’s markets. Jad goes searching for who she really was, and how she became the person who galvanized a movement when history demanded it of her. (45 minutes)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. |
| 0:05.3 | If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. |
| 0:11.8 | Okay, so I want to tell your story. I'm going to start with the part you probably already know about. |
| 0:17.1 | In November, six Democrats, all veterans of the U.S. military or intelligence communities, |
| 0:22.5 | came out with a video, saying to people in uniform, you took an oath like we did. |
| 0:27.0 | Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. |
| 0:30.9 | You can refuse illegal orders. |
| 0:33.1 | You must refuse illegal orders. |
| 0:35.6 | Those are senators Mark Kelly and Alyssa Slotkin and Congressman Chris Deluzio. |
| 0:39.7 | They did not specify what illegal orders they might be referring to. |
| 0:43.9 | At the time, just like now, the Trump administration was shooting boats of supposed drug runners |
| 0:48.4 | out of the water off the coastal Venezuela. |
| 0:51.6 | And lots of military experts and veterans were saying this did not seem to be |
| 0:54.7 | illegal. In the past, if we found boats of drug runners, we arrested them. We didn't just kill |
| 1:00.1 | them on the spot in cold blood, with no due process. The video also didn't mention the president |
| 1:06.5 | trying to order the National Guard into American cities, Portland and Chicago, where judges |
| 1:11.6 | stopped the orders, saying they were illegal. Like I say, the video mentioned no specific orders |
| 1:17.1 | at all. And really, the video might have vanished into the daily noise of a million news stories |
| 1:23.0 | and online videos like almost everything else does these days, it really could have come and gone |
| 1:28.0 | and been forgotten. Except that the president went on truth social and called the video |
| 1:33.1 | seditious behavior, punishable by death. Say he wanted the lawmakers to be tried as traitors. |
| 1:39.8 | Stephen Miller, who seems to run so many things in the White House these days, went on TV to declare. |
... |
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