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Beto Can Win

Steve Phillips on Texas, plus Dave Lindorff on atom spies.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

January 13, 2022

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke speaks during a campaign rally at Republic Square on December 04, 2021 in Austin, Texas.(Brandon Bell / Getty Images)

Beto O’Rourke’s strategy for winning the governorship of Texas focuses on organizing everywhere to massively boost Democratic voter turnout—the strategy Stacey Abrams has followed in Georgia. Steve Phillips explains how more than a million young voters of color will be eligible to vote in 2022 who were not old enough four years ago—when Beto first ran statewide and came within 214,921 votes of winning.

Also: new discoveries about America’s atom spies. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in June 1953. We know that Julius did not give “the secret of the A-bomb” to the Russians—that was the work of a couple of other people. And the FBI knew it at the time. So why did the FBI go after the Rosenbergs, instead of the person they knew was the real spy? His name was Ted Hall—a brilliant young physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. The FBI investigated him, but never charged him with a crime. Now Dave Lindorff has found out why.

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Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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