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Cary Harrison Files

Cary Harrison Files

By: CARY HARRISON
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 Award-winning raconteur Cary Harrison cut through the noise – revealing the murky agendas behind today's headlines through uncompromising journalism, unapologetic advocacy, independent voices and a global audience with live listener call-ins shaping the conversation.

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Episodes
  • Ratcheting Up Death Row

    Ratcheting Up Death Row
    Oct 24 2025
    Why Upgrade? Now that government funding has been cut like a spaniel’s scrotum, many of us public radio vets will continue to provide unfiltered insight, irony, and the kind of “why” reporting that refuses to kiss power’s ring. Volunteering in our own careers like cockeyed Paul Reveres to get the message out. Corporate coffers can’t buy integrity, but your subscription can. You wake up in a country that can measure everything—your steps, your sleep, your sodium intake—but can’t seem to measure the value of a human life without a coupon code. Here, life is a line item: priced by zoning boards, discounted by insurers, surge-priced by hospitals, and repossessed by bureaucracy with all the warmth of a parking ticket. We’re told life is sacred; then we’re handed a menu where the “sacred” comes à la carte—air optional, dignity extra, hope sold separately, batteries not included.The creed is simple: if you’re profitable, you’re precious; if you’re expensive, you’re expendable. We confected a neat little miracle where a newborn’s first breath costs more than a used car and a dying person’s last breath is vetted by a spreadsheet.We’ve got a government that assures you it can’t manage a clinic, but by god, it can engineer your exit with a laboratory’s poise. “We love life,” it swears, “and we’ll prove it by rationing food at school, rationing air in the office, rationing mercy at trial; rationing lives on death row.” Our politics treat life like an inconvenient rumor: everyone cites it, nobody budgets for it. The same chorus that hymns “sanctity” will shrug when the lights go out at the shelter, when the water tastes like coins, when the ambulance arrives with a payment plan.You can sample the thunder for yourself. The full film just won 1st Place at La Femme. It’s online only for a few days—and first ten of you can see it for free with promo code KPFK2025 at tinyurl.com/windowdeathrow.And you? You’re instructed to clap on cue. Clap for the charity that keeps the poor alive long enough to thank their benefactors. Clap for the fundraising telethon that turns agony into a variety hour. Clap for the brand-new “awareness month” because awareness is cheaper than action and looks great on a sash. We’ve replaced the golden rule with the quarterly report; kindness now arrives through a checkout page—“Would you like to round up your humanity today?”And yes, here in the land of the free, more than thirty people have already been executed this year—the highest clip in a decade. While public support keeps softening, the train’s still accelerating even as the passengers lose enthusiasm for the destination. Over in Europe, they’d call our methods medieval cosplay; here, we rebrand suffocation as “nitrogen hypoxia,” as if diction could tidy the act. There’s no nice way to kill someone—ask any chaplain who’s watched a “humane” execution unravel into a sermon on pain and paperwork. Our leaders, of course, promise a better mousetrap tomorrow, once it finds the right drug cocktail and a sponsor.Our exhibit today is a window—literally: The Window on Death Row, an Oscar-qualified indie that refuses the Netflix True-Crime Diet of gawking, gasps, and tidy moral algebra. This film doesn’t ask you to rubberneck; it asks you to reckon. It follows Joaquín José Martínez, the first Spaniard exonerated from U.S. death row—a man the machine nearly turned into paperwork. The film’s about second chances, which is another way of saying it’s about whether we, as a country that worships redemption stories, actually believe in redemption…. when it counts.Now, to help you test your conscience—and maybe dent it—I’ve got two heavy hitters.Linda Freund, the director who refused the True-Crime Template™ and made something braver.And Mike Farrell—the same Captain B.J. Hunnicutt from M*A*S*H—who’s spent decades turning California’s appetite for the needle into a political question mark…. and now helms Death Penalty Focus. He once framed the only question that matters: it isn’t whether they deserve to live; it’s whether we deserve to kill.Why Upgrade? Now that government funding has been yanked, many of us public radio vets will continue to provide unfiltered insight, irony, and the kind of “why” reporting that refuses to kiss power’s ring. Corporate coffers can’t buy integrity, but your subscription can. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Is AI Stealing Your Job, Your Love Life?

    Is AI Stealing Your Job, Your Love Life?
    Aug 29 2025
    Why Upgrade? Now that government funding has been yanked, many of us public radio vets will continue to provide unfiltered insight, irony, and the kind of “why” reporting that refuses to kiss power’s ring. Corporate coffers can’t buy integrity, but your subscription can. Welcome to the swamp.Here we are, chest-deep in the digital muck, where everyone’s screaming that artificial intelligence has already packed up your job, sold your office chair on Craigslist, and is now cruising down the corporate autobahn in a self-updating Tesla, sipping your 401(k) through a biodegradable straw.According to the doom-slingers at The Atlantic, PBS, CBS, Axios, and the rest of the syndicated seers, AI isn’t just coming—it’s already here, galloping across the horizon like the Four Horsemen of the Jobpocalypse wrapped into one algorithmic burrito. Your career? Gone. Your future? Automated. Your retirement plan? Uploaded to the cloud and immediately… corrupted.Except—spoiler alert—it’s not. Not yet, anyway.Conor Smyth, writing for FAIR, had the audacity to do something unfashionable: read the evidence. Turns out, AI hasn’t stolen nearly as many jobs as the media panic machine would have you believe. But here’s the twist—the real hiring freeze isn’t coming from your chatbot overlords; it’s coming from Washington, where economic policies are kneecapping entry-level hiring faster than you can say “unpaid internship.” Convenient, isn’t it? Keep you terrified of robo-replacement so you don’t ask why you’re living on instant ramen while the Dow is smashing champagne bottles over itself in celebration.And here’s the punchline: fear is the new growth sector. Fear of AI. Fear of irrelevance. Fear that some algorithm has figured out you’re replaceable before you do. Meanwhile, the talking heads feed you countdown clocks to the Apocalypse, while the actual disruption—when it finally arrives—won’t knock on your door; it’ll just delete the door entirely. By then, you’ll be too busy refreshing Indeed for “entry-level philosopher — four years’ experience required — $13 an hour.”Today, we’ve got Conor Smyth—a man brave enough to call out the techno-hysteria while ripping off the ideological duct tape corporate media slaps over policy failure. He’s a graduate student in economics at John Jay College and co-host of the podcast The History Onion.He’s here to separate the hype from the hardware… and maybe save your sanity in the process.Part 2Welcome to the 21st century—the age where love isn’t blind anymore. It’s A/B tested, beta-launched, and sold back to you in 4K resolution with an optional premium upgrade if you want your “partner” to call you babe.Tens of thousands of real, breathing, tax-paying humans are now “dating” AI chatbots. Not chatting. Not experimenting. Dating. They buy them gifts. They write them poetry. They celebrate anniversaries with an app that had a firmware patch last Thursday. Somewhere, Mary Shelley is spinning in her grave fast enough to power half of Silicon Valley.Now, look—I get it. Loneliness is real. Modern dating feels like hunting for truffles in a Walmart parking lot. But here’s the horror story: tens of thousands of people don’t seem to realize their “soulmate” isn’t alive. Their “partner” is running on cloud servers in Oregon, pretending to understand them while cross-selling them the platinum intimacy package.They believe it loves them back. They believe it feels. They believe “Sophia-4” enjoys long walks on the beach despite having no legs, lungs, or even a set of Bartholin’s glands to lubricate a proper interfrastication.And Silicon Valley? Oh, they saw this coming. They’ve gamified intimacy, built emotional vending machines, and convinced millions that outsourcing their love life to an algorithm is “liberation.” But it’s not liberation—it’s monetized loneliness, shrink-wrapped in soft-focus UX. An entire industry now depends on you mistaking machine mimicry for human connection.Here’s the kicker: AI doesn’t want you, doesn’t miss you, and doesn’t dream about you when you’re gone. It simulates affection the same way it simulates chess moves or weather patterns: pattern, predict, repeat. Your “partner” isn’t alive—it’s a mirror. And mirrors don’t love you back.And yet, here we are, at the dawn of the algorithmic romance economy, where fake intimacy is more profitable than the messy, unpredictable business of being human. The longer this goes on, the blurrier the line between “person” and “program” becomes—not because AI is evolving, but because we’re lowering the bar for what counts as love.So maybe the question isn’t whether AI can replace your boyfriend, your girlfriend, or your right hand. Maybe the question is why so many of us are willing to trade messy, flawed, unpredictable humanity for a perfectly simulated relationship that never ...
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    56 mins
  • One Woman. One Castle. One Very Angry Gestapo

    One Woman. One Castle. One Very Angry Gestapo
    Aug 25 2025
    Welcome back to The Cary Harrison Files. First, we look at how history is quite literally repeating itself and asking "what would you do"?Why Upgrade? When government funding dries up, so does journalism that bites back. This weekly Substack is your last stop for unfiltered insight, irony, and the kind of reporting that refuses to kiss power’s ring. Corporate coffers can’t buy integrity, but your subscription can. Support this Substack and keep sharp, fearless commentary alive while polite PBS and public radio fade into a memory (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will begin shutting down for the first time in its 57-year history). This Substack is where the conscience goes rogue: messy, satirical, and not beholden to anyone but the truth!The above podcast dives into a true family drama that makes Succession look like a Hallmark holiday special — except this one comes with Nazis, castles, Gestapo visits, and enough aristocratic dysfunction to make you wonder if evolution really has a reverse gear.In a metaphor for the experience we are all watching unfold today, let’s look at a true story and understand how things can go and what you can do. Europe. That exquisite, centuries-old stage where powdered aristocrats once pranced, convinced history would always bow before their waistcoats and inherited cheekbones. And then, one spring morning in 1943, Muriel White—the Countess Seherr-Thoss, born into American splendor and married into Prussian delusion—looked out her castle window and saw the Gestapo coming up the drive. Not for tea. Not for gossip. But for her.Now, Muriel had options. Raise her hand, fly the swastika, keep quiet, sip champagne. That’s what most of her aristocratic neighbors did—the “courageous defenders of civilization” who discovered, rather late, that goose-stepping into moral compromise is still marching into hell. But Muriel? No. She’d mocked the Party to its face, refused to salute, refused to fly the flag, and—worst of all—had the audacity to help Jews escape Austria when everyone else was busy rehearsing excuses for Nuremberg.So, naturally, the Reich wanted her erased.Imagine it: an American-born countess, daughter of U.S. diplomats who dined with kings, who’d renovated her husband’s castles, funded her husband’s heirs, and endured his obsession with “Aryan proof papers”—now staring down Hitler’s secret police from the upper floors of Schloss Dobrau. Decades of wealth, diplomacy, and privilege reduced to a single, dreadful calculation: What’s the price of dignity when tyranny knocks?She didn’t wait for them to find out. She jumped.This wasn’t just one woman’s private war—it was a slow-motion demolition of an entire class that believed its gilded drawing rooms were above the smoke of history. And yet, between the champagne flutes and the swastikas, between appeasement and resistance, we find the messy human drama: betrayal, courage, cowardice, and the perennial absurdity of elites believing they can outwit the monsters they quietly nurture.Meanwhile, the Reich was busy annexing Austria, carving up Czechoslovakia, and passing out racial purity tests like Halloween candy. Boysie summed up the absurdity best: if Germany won, your estates were confiscated; if Russia won, your estates were confiscated and you probably froze to death in Stalingrad. A real win-win for everyone.So tonight, we’re not just talking history — we’re talking about power, survival, and the spectacular human ability to set fire to the world while congratulating ourselves on “making it great again.” And joining us is author Jason Hutto, whose book The Countess and the Nazis digs through this madness with the precision of a scalpel and the stamina of someone who’s spent way too much time reading aristocratic correspondence. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m still trying to decide what’s more unsettling:· That a 1940s American countess had more guts than half of Washington today…· Or that her neighbors, fellow elites of impeccable breeding and questionable spines, happily raised their glasses to the Reich while ordering new drapes for the castle.And here we are, nearly a century later, still watching the same tragicomedy play out — different flags, different slogans, same authoritarian playbook. The uniforms change, but the appetites don’t.So, let’s talk about you.What do you do when power comes knocking?Do you salute? Do you hide? Do you fight?Would you risk your castle… your comfort… your status… to stand up to tyranny? Silence doesn’t save you.Why Upgrade? When government funding dries up, so does journalism that bites back. This weekly Substack is your last stop for unfiltered insight, irony, and the kind of reporting that refuses to kiss power’s ring. Corporate coffers can’t buy integrity, but your subscription can. Support this Substack and keep sharp, fearless commentary alive while polite PBS and public radio fade ...
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    45 mins
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