Listen: Leonard Peltier in His Own Words, Plus More

Rev. Billy and Savitri D. talk with American Indian Movement Leader Leonard Peltier, freed after 50 years in prison.

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of We Decide: America at the Crossroads with Jenna Flanagan Pacifica’s Rev. Billy and Savitri D. sit down with Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement [AIM] leader who was prosecuted for the 1975 shootout on a South Dakota reservation that left two FBI agents dead. Peltier spent a half‑century in federal prison and has always maintained he was wrongfully convicted.

After an international campaign on his behalf that included a coalition as diverse as the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and musician Steven Van Zandt, President Joe Biden granted Peltier clemency, permitting him to return to his home earlier this year.

Peltier recalls his lived history, including the brutality of U.S. Indian boarding schools where Native American school‑aged children were forcibly removed from their families and subjected to corporal punishment for speaking their tribal languages. He further describes his path to AIM and his lifetime of principled resistance.

Peltier also discusses historical parallels among the Nazi regime’s genocide of the Jewish people, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America, and Israel’s all‑out siege and starvation of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza as a tool for territorial expansion.

Our reporter roundtable with D.C.-based Dave Levinthal and NYC‑based Laura Jedeed also discusses President Trump’s move to take over Washington, D.C.’s municipal police force, citing a non‑existent crime wave at a time when data show homicides are actually down in the nation’s capital, which has been pressing for statehood for a generation.

Levinthal and Jedeed also talk about Trump’s Alaska visit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and discuss the implications of Trump’s unprecedented attack on the federal civil service and the American union movement, stripping close to 400,000 employees from the Veterans Administration of their collective‑bargaining rights.

The Federal News Network reports that the Trump administration is allowing VA law‑enforcement employees to retain their collective‑bargaining rights. A few days later, employees with the U.S. EPA had their collective‑bargaining rights ended.

Jenna also with Matt Angle, who served as chief of staff to former Rep. Martin Frost of Texas and is the founder and director of the Lone Star Project. From 2000–2004, Angle served as the executive director of the U.S. House Democratic Caucus. He also served as executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) during the 1996 and 1998 election cycles.

He lays out how Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s scheme, at President Trump’s instruction to add Republican seats to the Lone Star State’s House delegation, has implications for undermining democracy in a big way. Angle explained why dozens of Democratic members of the Texas state legislature fled the state and found sanctuary in blue states like New York, Illinois, and California.

Angle also describes how the Texas GOP is doubling down on race‑based gerrymandering that would further erode Black and Latino representation. He warns that Texas’s seat grab is likely to prompt reprisal reapportionments from Democratic‑led states like New York and California.

Listen to the entire show below: