This Week with David Rovics

My latest collaboration with the Ai Tsuno Project drops on all the music streaming platforms on February 1st.  Here's a guided tour of the album.

Chad Westover is a man around my age, who also lives in Oregon. David first learned about Chad because of having kids, and living in the same city as Chad’s extended family.

Chad’s extended family is full of kind and loving people, which, by the accounts of all of them and many others, Chad is, too.

Chad’s generous nature was exactly what led him to want to stick up for his friend, who was being threatened and bullied by his friend’s neighbor. In the ensuing confrontation, the neighbor pulled out a knife and stabbed Chad three times.

Chad then managed to get a hold of the knife and stab his assailant, who, very unfortunately, was killed that night in September 2024.

Press reports have tended to paint a picture that, naturally enough, positions the deceased, Tristan Thomas, as the victim, and Chad as the murderer. A simple scenario involving a perpetrator and his victim. But if you look a little closer at the details of the whole encounter, it all becomes much more complex.

It’s obviously incredibly tragic that anyone was killed that night. There are a lot of things that everyone involved could have done differently, that might have avoided anyone getting hurt in the first place. But that’s not how things played out, and ultimately, Chad was not the one who pulled out a weapon, and he clearly does not deserve to be charged with murder.

If there is to be justice in this case, Chad should be with his family, rather than in jail in Clackamas, facing a possible murder charge, and a potential sentence of decades in prison.

“Song for Chad Westover” will drop on all the music streaming platforms on February 1st, as part of the latest album of the Ai Tsuno Project, War with the World.

 

Just before our Berkeley show last night, Kamala and I spent the hour with Dennis Bernstein as guests of Flashpoints on KPFA Community Radio. Along with us there were appearances via phone from the brilliant poet, Anita Barrows, and a report from the streets of Minneapolis as well.

I had a very nice and wide-ranging interview with Rebel Fagin on his Radio Resistance radio show recently, which was broadcast on his show on KBBF Community Radio on Sunday. Here's the podcast version.

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about AI to me, and in general.  Here I make a bit of effort to distinguish the baby from the bathwater.

The Ai Tsuno Project's latest album, Save the Humans, drops on all the music streaming platforms on January 15th.  Ai Tsuno’s 10th album includes such instant classics as “Disarm Israel,” “Message from Gaza,” and “Bisbee, Arizona, 1917.”

A song for Renee Nicole Good, killed by ICE in Minneapolis on January 7th, 2026.

As much as Trump is behaving in ways that could be characterized as unprecedented, in other ways his behavior is surprisingly consistent with the history of US imperialism.

How is it that our oil is always underneath their soil?

What does the US invasion of Venezuela, the Cuba-Venezuela Solidarity Tent at the World Social Forum, and my visit to the US-Mexico border last weekend have in common?