Crooked Media
17 episodes listed below
Family history inside American radicalism.
Mother Country Radicals treats the Weather Underground story as family history, street history, and political argument at once. Its strongest chapters move from intimate memory into SDS, the Black Panthers, Days of Rage, prison, police pressure, and the seductive certainty of revolutionary action.
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Mother Country Radicals is not a detached tour through the Weather Underground. It is political history with family inside it. The series follows the children, comrades, enemies, slogans, and consequences surrounding young radicals who decided that protest was not enough. Its center of gravity is the late 1960s and 1970s, when SDS fractured, the Black Panther Party faced raids and prosecutions, and white activists tried to define solidarity through confrontation. The show is brisk, grave, and intimate. It begins from lived proximity, then widens into a map of movements, policing, prisons, race, and revolutionary fantasy. The chapters on Days of Rage are especially revealing. They show young Weathermen preparing for Chicago with books, films, karate practice, weapons training, and an almost cinematic hunger to become the kind of people history would have to notice. The series does not treat that hunger as simple courage. It keeps pressing on the difference between sacrifice and performance, between standing with Black revolutionaries and centering white guilt in a new costume. That tension gives the show its charge. Fred Hampton’s rejection of the protest cuts through the romance, while accounts of the New York Panthers bring the story back to surveillance, conspiracy charges, unaffordable bail, and months inside jail before trial. The show’s best passages move from a phrase like “choose sides” into the hard machinery behind it. A speech becomes a march. A march becomes a police response. A claim of solidarity becomes a test of ego, strategy, and consequence. Interviews and archival recordings are not there for texture alone; they sharpen the argument and sometimes complicate it. The series also understands how stories about radicals can become too clean. It holds onto the mess: moral seriousness, reckless escalation, real racism, real state violence, real harm, and the strange glamour that can gather around outlaw politics. Its feed also includes previews of adjacent documentary series about institutions, policing, cities, and media power, but the core identity remains the same. Mother Country Radicals is for listeners who want history that feels argued from the inside, not polished into neutrality. It asks what a revolution costs when the people chasing it are also trying to invent themselves.
Made for: For listeners drawn to political history, investigative documentary, civil rights-era conflict, and morally complicated stories about activism, policing, prison, and power. It will especially fit those who prefer a strong editorial spine over neutral summary.
What sets it apart: Its distinction is proximity: the Weather Underground is treated not as distant true crime mythology, but as inherited family history tested against Black Panther organizing, state pressure, and the radicals’ own self-mythology.
Zayd Dohrn was born underground - his parents were radicals and counter-culture outlaws, on the run from the FBI. Now Zayd takes us back to the 1970s, when his parents and their young friends in the Weather Underground Organization declared war on the United States government. They brawled with riot cops on the streets of Chicago, bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, broke comrades out of prison, and teamed up with Black militant groups to rob banks, fight racism - and help build a revolution.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Family proximity gives Mother Country Radicals an intimate, unsparing way to trace revolutionary conviction and its consequences.
Mother Country Radicals turns Zayd Dohrn's family connection to the Weather Underground into narrative history with an unusually close view of revolutionary commitment.
Family memory walks into the Days of Rage, and your neat moral categories do not make it home.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A history-minded episode that links policing's beginnings to the present.
Empire City treats policing as a history that has to be traced back to its roots. It moves from slavery's beginnings into the machinery that let a constable like Boudinot profit from kidnapping free Black people.
A desert city story where deep history and local power keep colliding.
Dreamtown: The Story of Adelanto follows a place that starts underwater, passes through the Van U, Spanish claims, and long rounds of violence, treaties, and redrawn borders before landing in California and the early 1900s plan to build on the land.
A sharp look at Penthouse, balancing Bob Guccione's self-mythology with the women working inside his orbit.
Bob Guccione is framed as a self-made spectacle: a publisher who talks about respect for women while leaning on wealth, authority, and a polished late-night persona.
A tense account of protest hardening into militant action.
Days of Rage follows the Weathermen as they drift from protest into militant preparation in Chicago, with Bernadine Dorn helping drive that turn.
A tense chapter where revolutionary politics meet police power and the cost becomes personal.
The chapter tracks the clash between revolutionary idealism and state force, moving from solidarity with the Black Panther Party to raids, indictments, and jailhouse fear.
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
Patrick Radden Keefe investigates whether the CIA secretly wrote a Scorpions hit.
Jake Halpern and the Snowball team track a con artist who defrauded a family.
A city-by-city true-crime documentary, from Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick scandal to mob confessions.
This is a preview episode for Campus Files, a podcast about scandals in American higher education.
Host Chinjerai Kumaneka introduces Empire City, a series on the untold history of the NYPD, by revealing he recently found surveillance footage of his late father, a civil rights organizer, filmed by NYPD counterintelligence in 1964.
Adelanto begins underwater.
Bob Guccione opens the story on Nightwatch.
This episode of Mother Country Radicals follows the narrator's father, Bill Ayers, from idealistic teacher at an Ann Arbor freedom school in 1965 to a participant in the Weathermen's first bombing and the 1969 Days of Rage protests in Chicago.
Chapter 3 of Mother Country Radicals follows two parallel radicalization arcs: Jamal Joseph, a 15-year-old in the Bronx who joins the New York Black Panther Party after witnessing a standoff during the 1968 King assassination riots, and the Chicago Weathermen, who are escalating from street protests to bombings.