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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Hinwood. Two segments today.

Donna Merch will talk about black radical politics of the past and present.

And Kyle Chabunco will look at the phenomenon of Victor Orbán, the Hungarian strongman who's become a hero to the American right.

Donna Merch, making her third appearance in Behind the News, is just out with a collection of nine essays.

Donna taught me state violence, racial capitalism and the movement for black lives published by Heymarket Books.

It looks at black radical politics over the last six decades from the origin of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s through the movement for black lives today.

Donna Merch is an associate professor of history at Rutgers and is president of the New Brunswick chapter of the Faculty Union, the AAUPAFT.

Donna Merch.

Let's start with the title. What does that mean?

So the title Asada taught me comes from it has a double meaning. So it's most immediate reference was a phrase that I saw being used in convenings for the movement for black lives.

It was a reference to Asada Chakor was a member of the New York Black Panther Party and then part of the splinter faction, the Black Liberation Army.

And it was a real source of surprise and kind of delight to see that a younger generation of people born many of them in the 1980s were looking back to the Panther Party, but not to the founders of the party to Hugh Newton and Bobby Seal or to the place where the party was founded, but that they were tracing their lineage back to Asada Chakor, who was a rank of member of the New York Party, which was expelled in 1971.

What's striking about this is that Asada published an autobiography in the 1980s and she's someone who went through multiple trials and was accused of having killed a New Jersey law enforcement officer, but she was convicted on multiple counts, but was actually broken out of prison and became a fugitive to Cuba and currently lives in Cuba today.

It's also about not only a connection to these radical politics and radical organizations of the past, but it's also Asada as symbol of fugitivity and hope.

The second meaning of the title is something very personal that my introduction to the Panther Party into black radicalism was largely through her autobiography, published in 1987.

So it's both a movement reference and a personal reference to how I end up being set on the path of writing the book, starting it as a dissertation as a young person on the black Panther Party.

Okay, so this book is a collection of several essays on different topics.

So let's just cover a few of them in turn.

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