“Best of 2022” lists in The Atlantic, Vulture, Vanity Fair, Hollywood Reporter, etc.
As the nation tuned in to the January 6 hearings, my favorite podcast of the year, Mother Country Radicals, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Mother Country Radicals is hosted by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, a playwright and the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers—leaders of the Weather Underground. Over the summer, Zayd toldChicago magazine that one of the reasons he decided to tell the story now “was that it was the Trump administration when [he] started, and [he] was thinking a lot about how young activists tried to resist out-of-control law-and-order authoritarian governments.” This podcast has all the ingredients: a narrator with personal stakes recounting his own childhood on the run from the FBI; unprecedented accounts inside notorious jailbreaks; youth culture against the backdrop of a country in tumult, not too dissimilar from our own.
In the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn was on the FBI’s 10-most-wanted list because of her actions as part of the Weather Underground, a radical group that used violent measures to protest the Vietnam War and the country’s treatment of Black people, among other social issues. She and the other “Weathermen,” as they called themselves, believed that as white people, it was their job to stop these injustices, even if it meant resorting to illegal, dangerous tactics and hiding to avoid prison. But Bernardine was a mother too—and her son, Zayd Dohrn, is the host of this show. Mother Country Radicals takes you to the far left, then past it. The series grapples with the impact of bold choices on children and what it means to feel entitled to reproduce—to live freely—despite the consequences.
When family history and political history collide, the result is quite something. At the heart of Mother Country Radicals is the story of the Weather Underground, the ’70s militant left-wing organization that sought to overthrow the American government, told from the inside out. The show is led by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, who happens to be the son of two former Weather Underground leaders, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Ayers Dohrn builds an oral history from a collection of intimate interviews that involve not only his parents but surviving members of the broader revolutionary network that drove the politics of the era’s counterculture: the Black Liberation Army, the Timothy Leary–sparked LSD movement, and so on. The podcast is a remarkable document — detailed, layered, and complicated — speaking as much to the deep imperfections of the movement as to the profoundly hopeful political imagination that sparked it.
Mother Country Radicals tells the story of the far-left militant organization The Weather Underground, and the war it waged on the U.S. government. The host is playwright Zayd Dohrn, son of Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Zayd was born underground, his mom and dad on the run from the FBI. The podcast recounts Zayd’s memories of the 1970s, including his recollections of the bombings of the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, brawling with Chicago cops, prison breaks, a partnership with the Black Panthers, and, ultimately, the birth of a revolution. Zayd is the perfect storyteller to offer us real stakes insight into the history and politics of his parents’ movement.
Mother Country Radicals
After publicly declaring war on the United States in 1970, the members of the Weather Underground, a radical anti-Vietnam-War group, spent the next decade on the run. Mother Country Radicals, a podcast created and hosted by Zayd Dohrn (the son of Bernardine Dohrn, one of the group’s most prominent members), reports on the group’s formation, their years underground and their collaboration with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation movements. This compelling 10-episode journey is more than just an oral history; it’s a guide to acting on your beliefs, an appraisal of radical movements and a complicated intergenerational conversation between the Weather Underground members and their heirs.
Two of my faves of this year are our own Forgotten Revolutionary and Mother Country Radicals, which is about the Weather Underground and hosted by Zayd Dohrn, whose parents were leaders in the organization. I think of them as a great duo since both tell resonant stories of leftist history from the perspective of hosts who are deeply personally invested.
NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands)
“A wonderful investigation into the origin of activism and radicalization.”
