Good evening, current affairs listeners. My name is Nathan Robinson, and I am here with

Oren Nimney, our current affairs legal editor. Hello, Oren. Hello, everyone. And we have an

extremely special guest tonight, an activist legend, Mr. Lee Weiner. He is the author of the

new book, Conspiracy to Riot, the Life and Times of one of the Chicago 7 out now from Velt Publishing.

Mr. Wino was, as the title indicates, a member of what was first known as the Conspiracy 8,

later reduced to the Chicago 7, the group of activists charged with felonies after the chaos

of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which led to what was,

if not the trial of the century, certainly the trial of the 60s. During that trial, Mr. Weiner

was known as the quiet defendant, but that was perhaps only a relative judgment because it's

easy to be the quiet defendant

when one of your co-defendants is Abby Hoffman.

It has resonance with us today, this trial.

It is a tale of police brutality and excessive prosecution.

And of the question of how to be an activist, how to improve the world, how to, how to survive and how to

affect what's going on around you in the middle of a tumultuous history. So Mr. Weiner's

memoir could not be more timely, so we're thrilled to have him with us. Hello.

Hello. Nice to be. I want to start with something that you talk about a couple times in the book.

You mention the sort of looming shadow of the prior generation of kind of young, of communists of the 30s and 40s.

You grew up in the kind of straight-laced world of the 1950s and were one of that

generation that came of age just as the civil rights movement were taking off. But you talk about how,

I guess you were what is known as a red diaper baby yourself?

Oh, not quite.

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