In the past three years, public opinion has swung strongly in support of police reform, from most Americans being against it to a strong majority now supporting it. Support for reform leapt upward in response to the horrific video of George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020. It’s terrible but true that it can take something like that to motivate change, as Martin Luther King … [Read more...] about Georgina Mendoza McDowell: What We Already Know About How to Reform Policing
Susan Neiman: What America Can Learn From Germany About Facing Its Past
More than a century and a half after the Civil War, America still hasn’t faced the full truth of what caused that catastrophe or what came after it. Many Americans still believe in the myth of the Lost Cause, a rewritten history in which a noble, innocent South valiantly defended itself against invaders from the North. In this fiction, slaveholders became the victims. Racism — … [Read more...] about Susan Neiman: What America Can Learn From Germany About Facing Its Past
Abené Clayton: Guns and Lies
We know all too well the threat of gun violence in America. Compared to other high-income countries, our rate of gun deaths per capita is 25 times higher. But much of what Americans think they know about the costs and causes of gun violence is wrong. And few are aware of solutions that have already been shown to work. To help fix that, The Guardian has been running a … [Read more...] about Abené Clayton: Guns and Lies
Vinz Koller: How to Repair Democracy
American democracy is more fragile than many of us ever imagined. But we’ve been neglecting and abusing it so much that maybe the bigger surprise is that it’s lasted as long as it has. A lot of that damage can still be fixed, though—as long as we don’t let the whole thing fall apart first. Spencer's guest Vinz Koller has great insights on what's gone wrong and how we can … [Read more...] about Vinz Koller: How to Repair Democracy
Living With Big Lies
Even with Trump out of office, the Republican Party's leaders and media enablers seem determined to live in a world of lies — a place where democracy can't live. As host Spencer Critchley says, it's like life under Soviet domination as described by writers such as Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz: "Everything is a lie, everyone knows it's a lie, and everyone goes along with the … [Read more...] about Living With Big Lies