Back in America

Barry Beach lived four houses from Kim Nees in Poplar, Montana, a small town on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. In June 1979 Kim, 17, was beaten to death. Barry, also 17, was questioned and told he was free to go. In January 1983, in Louisiana, his stepmother handed police a sheriff's letter naming him as a suspect. A homicide task force questioned him for about seven hours with no lawyer, and he signed a confession. He has said ever since that it was false. In 1984 he was sentenced to 100 years without parole.This conversation is Barry's account, with Jim McCloskey as a second voice. Jim founded Centurion in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1983, the first wrongful-conviction organization in the US. It took Barry's case in 2000 after he wrote to them. Stan also asks Jim about Framed, the book he co-wrote with John Grisham.Along the way: why Barry turned himself in when he could have run, what helps the wrongly convicted rebuild, and what Barry tells every jury. Stan ends with the question he asks every guest: what is America to you?In this episode:- The detective who, in Barry's telling, described the electric chair and said he couldn't wait to see him fry: "It broke me down."- The brown jacket the confession put on Kim. She did not wear one.- How Centurion picks a case from the 1,000 to 1,200 letters it receives each year- Jim on why Barry's confession did not hold up- 2011: a judge orders a new trial and Barry walks out. 2013: the Montana Supreme Court reinstates the conviction, and he keeps his word to Centurion. "I coulda ran, I coulda took off."- House Bill 43, and Gov. Steve Bullock's commutation in November 2015, when Barry walked out at 53- Ten years of probation, his own handyman business, and a conviction that still stands- Jim on whether the system can be fixed, with 3,000 counties each running its own, and the 72 people Centurion has freedJim McCloskey's books:- Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions (2024), with John Grisham. Ten cases, five written by each.- When Truth Is All You Have, a memoirSubscribe to Back in America wherever you listen, and leave a review if this one moved you.

Alison Gieschen spent thirty years on a farm, raising horses, raising kids, living in a house her husband Dan built by hand. Then they sold all of it, the furniture, the horses, the house, and moved onto a 43-foot sailboat named Equus to sail around the world.This is the conversation about what that costs and what it gives back. Alison takes Stan back to the last night in the farmhouse, into the Atlantic storm that left her with PTSD, and to the friend whose question ("do you know how lucky you are?") put her back on the water. From a tiny island in the Marquesas, she has been watching America from the outside since 2017.Along the way: what 50 countries taught her about freedom versus security, the poverty she found in Cape Verde, the Chinese fishing fleets killing the ocean she now calls home, and the novel she wrote where horses sit in judgment of the human race. And the question Stan asks every guest: what is America to you?- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sailmates_on_equus/- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sailmates.org/- Author site and books: alisongieschen.com- Blog: Sailmates.org

Jeff Kruszyna has raised over a hundred million dollars for Christian conservative causes. He does it with paper letters that arrive in your mailbox. Twenty years ago, watching the second plane hit the second tower on a television set at SUNY Stony Brook, he changed his major from computer science to political science. He has been writing fundraising letters for America First causes ever since, with God, he says, as the real CEO.  This conversation traces the tradition behind Jeff's work: from John Winthrop's 1630 sermon on a ship crossing the  Atlantic to Ronald Reagan's optimistic nationalism to what Jeff calls the Patriot Economy, a marketplace where purchasing decisions become acts of faith. Stan asks about Max Weber, the prosperity gospel, Martin Luther King, and the money changers in the Temple.  Two questions drive the hour. Is this the most American thing imaginable? And is that a comfort or a warning?  Connect with Jeff:  - Free 30-minute strategy session: http://www.getjeffk.com  - Agency website: http://www.jmkvictory.com  - LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/Kruszyna  - X: @Kruszyna

  Bryan Mark Rigg failed first grade twice. Today he's a Yale and Cambridge-trained historian, a former Marine Corps officer, and the author of six books on World War II that have rewritten what we thought we knew about the war.                                                                                                                                                                                                           In this episode, Stan sits down with Bryan to unpack three of his most explosive findings:That 150,000 men of Jewish descent served in Hitler's military, and that Hitler himself signed thousands of exemption papers declaring individual Jews "Aryan." That the "ideal Aryan soldier" on Goebbels' propaganda magazine turned out to have a Jewish father. That a half-Jewish German veteran broke down on camera when he learned his wife and baby boy had been gassed at Auschwitz, and that his second wife discovered, in the same moment, after 50 years of marriage, that she was the second wife.                                                                                  That Woody Williams, the last living Medal of Honor recipient from Iwo Jima, fabricated key parts of his story. That a Marine Corps general told Bryan, "don't publish the truth, publish the myth." That Bryan said no, and Woody slapped him with a federal lawsuit. Bryan won at the Supreme Court of West Virginia.That Japan killed 30 million people during World War II, three times more than Nazi Germany, and almost no one knows.                                                                                    We also talk about Bryan's own American story. Severe dyslexia, ADHD, an MBD diagnosis at age six, a mother named MaryLee Rigg who refused to give up, and the small-classroom private schools that taught him how to read. The boy from Arlington, Texas who made it to Yale, the Marine Corps, and Cambridge.It's a conversation about hidden history, the cost of telling the ugly truth, and what America makes possible.  About Bryan Mark Rigg:                                                                                                                                                                                     Website: https://bryanmarkrigg.com/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bryanmarkrigg/                                                                                                                                                     Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Mark_Rigg

William Henry Seward was supposed to be president. In 1860, he was the favorite for the Republican nomination until he lost it to a lesser-known prairie lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Then, while Lincoln sat silent in Springfield for four months after the election, Seward fought alone from the Senate floor to save the Union.C. Evan Stewart, Cornell-trained historian, 40-year securities lawyer, and author of a new book on Seward, walks Stan through what really happened in the Secession Winter of 1860-61: the back-channel meetings with Virginia unionists, the proposed 13th Amendment that would have protected slavery forever, the April 1 memo raising the prospect of confrontation with France, and the day Lincoln changed his mind about Fort Sumter.From there, they go deeper. The Dred Scott decision and what Chief Justice Taney actually wrote. Why Stewart believes Chief Justice Roberts is quietly rebalancing American power today. Lincoln's record on civil liberties. And the French tariff parallel Stan raises that Stewart bluntly calls "completely different."Stewart closes with his answer to the show's signature question: What is America to you?More episodes at backinamericathepodcast.com. If this one landed, share it with someone who loves an untold story, and leave a rating. It pushes the show up in search and helps new listeners find us.William Henry Seward's Quest to Save the Nation During the Secession Winter (1860-1861)

Clifford Brown was a partner at a Beverly Hills law firm when he saw a newspaper ad that changed his life. He gave up most of his income, left his house over the ocean, and joined the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the next 27 years, he worked in Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Guinea, and Peru.In this conversation, Cliff describes bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, a practice where young men abduct women and force them into marriage. His own wife's older sister was kidnapped. Later, after Cliff spoke out against high-level corruption involving electricity smuggling, his wife was abducted at gunpoint outside a hair salon in Bishkek.We talk about what USAID actually did beyond humanitarian aid: creating agricultural industries that supplied American grocery stores, training accountants in post-Soviet states, building court systems across Latin America. A law called the Hickenlooper Law prohibited the agency from telling Americans about any of it.Cliff spent twenty years fighting his own agency's lawyers over whether the U.S. government could fund translations of Quranic texts that prohibit suicide, to counter radical Islam after 9/11. The lawyers said no, citing excessive entanglement with religion. His argument: it's legal to fund a bullet but not a conversation about scripture. The Washington Post covered his case in 2009.We discuss what USAID got wrong, including the failed counter-narcotics programs in Colombia and the democracy-building efforts that went nowhere in the former Soviet Union. And we talk about what fills the vacuum when America steps back, with China building railroads and mines across Africa on loan terms that countries cannot repay.On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order pausing nearly all foreign aid. By July 1, USAID officially ceased to exist. More than 80 percent of its programs were terminated. Cliff describes the sadness of watching colleagues lose their pensions overnight, and a former staff member from Kyrgyzstan now working in a grocery store deli.Clifford Brown is the author of Inside USAID: An Odyssey of Foreign Assistance. He writes at cliffordbrown.substack.com. From the conversation: "I felt like I was a mental prostitute. I had to think about somebody else's problem as an attorney, and the only reason I was thinking about it was they were paying me to think about it." -- Who Steps In When America Walks Away- "Half a million jobs in Honduras from an onion experiment. 300 villages in Guatemala connected to electricity for a $30,000 investment. Shrimp, cantaloupe, flour, broccoli, all shipped to American groceries from industry that USAID helped create." -- Who Steps In When America Walks Away- You might also like: • Wrongfully Convicted: Darryl Burton Spent 24 Years in Prison for a ... • Councilwoman Leticia Fraga - From Mexico to Princeton, NJ - A story... • Denis Devine - Fishtown, Philly - a non-traditional dad, an engaged...

A man's house catches fire. He tells police he ran through the flames saving his belongings. Then detectives pull the data from the pacemaker in his chest. His own heartbeat tells a different story.Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a professor of law at George Washington University Law School, a former public defender, and the author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance. In this conversation, he walks us through the criminal cases, the legal gaps, and the surveillance infrastructure that most Americans don't know they've already built around themselves. We talk about Google search histories used as confessions, smart home cameras that become prosecution witnesses, Palantir's expanding role in immigration enforcement, and what happens when the definition of "criminal" shifts but the data trail stays the same.Ferguson proposes something he calls the tyrant test: design your privacy protections by assuming the worst possible leader will have access to your data. He argues it's not a thought experiment. It's the logic the country was founded on.Book: Your Data Will Be Used Against You (NYU Press)https://nyupress.org/9781479838295/your-data-will-be-used-against-you/Guest: Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School From the conversation: "Everything you buy that is a smart device is a surveillance device. And what we've done is sort of build around us this network of smart devices that is revealing who we are and what we do." -- Your Heartbeat Can Convict You "Your smart pacemaker, almost anything you create with data can be used against you in a court of law." -- Your Heartbeat Can Convict You You might also like: • Wrongfully Convicted: Darryl Burton Spent 24 Years in Prison for a ... • Who should get the vaccine first? We didn’t know so we asked a phil... • A Pastor Joined the FBI. Then His Kids Came Out.

Eric Robinson spent twelve years in Christian ministry before leaving the pulpit for the FBI. For twenty-four years, he served as a special agent and SWAT operator, working counterterrorism, human trafficking, crimes against children, and public corruption. He also raised two transgender children inside one of the most conservative law enforcement cultures in the country.In this conversation, Eric talks about planting a church built on grace instead of judgment, why his two-year stress headache vanished the day the Bureau accepted him, and how buying a sandwich for a woman facing a trafficking charge helped him rescue a fifteen-year-old girl. He describes what his body did during a deadly force encounter, what his SWAT teammates said when he told them about his kids, and why he moved from "hate the sin, love the sinner" to just loving. We end with the Constitution, ICE, Christian nationalism, and whether the institution he gave his career to still resembles the one he joined.Eric's book, Irreverend: From Saving Souls to Chasing Sinners in the FBI, comes out this fall.Find Eric on LinkedInFollow Eric on Instagram You might also like: • The First Amendment: Freedom of Religion and Diversity in America –... • Zionism, Mysticism, and the Law: Sam Shonkoff and his students on A... • Toby Fraser - Men Explore Their Masculinity in Philadelphia

Recorded on February 25th at the Alliance Francaise in New York, this special French-language episode features Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur in conversation with Emmanuel Saint-Martin at an event organized by French Morning. One of France's very few female rabbis and a bestselling author, Delphine opens up about the firestorm she faced after speaking out on Gaza, the death threats from both sides, the blind spots that trauma creates, and why the art of disagreement may be the most urgent skill of our time. She shares a stunning street encounter with an Iranian woman during the Israel-Iran war, reflects on the Talmudic roots of real debate, and answers a member of the audience who tells her directly: you lost me. Raw, personal, and deeply relevant to anyone trying to hold onto complexity in an era of noise.Wiki Page From the conversation: "People whisper to me what they're afraid to say out loud—thank you for speaking what you think, but you dare not say it. This sentence makes me sick because we can no longer speak." -- Delphine Horvilleur- -People Whisper to Me What They're Afraid to Say Out Loud- (in French) "The problem is not that we cannot speak, the problem is that we can no longer listen to where the other is when he speaks." -- Delphine Horvilleur- -People Whisper to Me What They're Afraid to Say Out Loud- (in French) You might also like: • Zionism, Mysticism, and the Law: Sam Shonkoff and his students on A... • The First Amendment: Freedom of Religion and Diversity in America –... • James Baldwin, Black Vernacular, and Why America Can’t ‘Just Move On

A French teenager arrives in Iowa for a year as an exchange student. He falls in love. He spends the next 25 years in France building a career, a family, a life. Then in 2016, his wife gets a job offer in the US, and they move back with their three teenage daughters. What he discovers is that America changed, but more importantly, so did he.This is the story of what makes America fundamentally different. It's the only country where you can truly become something new while keeping everything you were. You can't become French, no matter how hard you try or how long you stay. But you can become American. And that distinction changed everything for Stan.In this episode of Back in America, Stan reflects on the gap between the America he remembered and the America he came back to. He talks about green cards and citizenship, about raising multicultural kids caught between two worlds, about voting for the first time, and about the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of something France could never offer: the chance to belong by choice rather than by bloodline.If you've ever wondered what it actually takes to become a citizen, what you gain and what you keep, this conversation answers it.What You'll Learn:The difference between a Green Card and US citizenship (and why both matter)What the naturalization process actually requiresHow America's immigration model fundamentally differs from countries like FranceWhy Stan's journey proves that you can be two things at once You might also like: • A German Turned Deputy Sheriff in Arizona: Tom Peine’s Unlikely Ame... • Councilwoman Leticia Fraga - From Mexico to Princeton, NJ - A story... • Carole Jury - 'La femme de...' se réinvente aux Etats-Unis et devie...