Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News

I wasn’t able to fit this commentary in before the suit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News Network and Rupert Murdoch was settled. But I want to get back to it because I think it is important to understand how misguided speculation was that the Supreme Court might change the rule if the case got to them.

Before the Constitution and before the First Amendment, the old British rule applied here. It made the press responsible for defamation, meaning any damage to someone’s reputation. So the more damaging the truth, the more the press had to pay. It wasn’t until John Adams was president that the Alien and Sedition Acts protected true, though hurtful, statements. But the rule left no slack for mistakes.

In the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan case the Court finally cut the press some slack. It held:

The constitution[] … prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with “actual malice” – that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.

The original ruling was limited to public officials but the Court quickly expanded that to public figures.

The malice language confuses many. The Court referred to malice for historical reasons. But it defined malice narrowly as statements made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” The word “malice” adds nothing. Knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard of the truth became the legal standard after Times v. Sullivan. That meant that honest mistakes are protected but lies and reckless behavior are not.

David McCraw, a vice-president of the New York Times and former student of mine at Albany Law School, spoke in my class on Comparative Constitutional Law and explained how protective that standard is to the media by comparison with other countries which make them responsible for any mistakes and whatever injury to reputation they cause.

So Dominion charged Fox with violating what was already a very lenient standard. It didn’t just charge Fox with screwing up. It charged it with knowing falsehood, deliberately lying, or reckless disregard of the truth, by repeatedly reporting what they knew to be false, reporting as true what they told each other privately was false, and what the evidence they had showed was false. Fox had plenty of slack for mistakes. It could have told its audience that people were making claims and spreading rumors that Fox was unable to substantiate. What it couldn’t do was report rumors and claims as fact that it knew were false or didn’t bother to check. Fox was going too far by reporting fantasy as news. It violated a very lenient form of press responsibility. Condoning reckless falsehoods or deliberate lies has serious consequences.

Overruling Times v. Sullivan would have imposed a stricter obligation on Fox and wouldn’t have helped it. It’s important to recognize that Fox was not being held to a strict standard; it was being held to a very generous standard, and it apparently couldn’t even meet that one.

I think the Court got it right in Times v. Sullivan but some media outlets still fail to live up to their obligation for honest reporting.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on May 23, 2023.

Unions Missing from Public Discourse

There was a time when people had organizations in which they had discussions that crossed partisan lines. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were dedicated discussion organizations, some called lyceums, some called Chautauquas. They were all over the country and in many small communities. I’ve spoken at the original Chautauqua in western New York. It was wonderful for me – C-Span broadcast it nationally and Chautauqua paid me handsomely to talk about my book on the Rehnquist Court. I never once mentioned Democrats or Republicans. They expected and wanted to hear talks from people with very different views.

Those institutions were founded before the development of a reliable, neutral, national press. That was a twentieth century development, which owed its creation in part to advertisers who wanted to reach everyone without regard to partisan divisions. Some lecturers like Ralph Waldo Emerson were the rock stars of the age. But for the most part, those organizations were participatory – they were not about experts talking down to people. This is also before the professionalization of universities which was also a post-Civil War development with graduate schools on the German model. The great universities that we know today made that leap into specialization in the nineteenth century, the better to dig deeper into understanding the world around. That doesn’t mean they were liberal – they reflected the prejudices of their days – but they were getting involved in the production of knowledge.

Labor unions were another example of the organization of knowledge often at cross-purposes to partisanship. They grew as a third force, as agents for their members, so their partisan alignments depended on what the parties did for them lately – and they switched sides as needed. That meant many workers had organizations they trusted to represent their interests. It was not about party loyalty. It was about loyalty to the workers in their fields of endeavor. I don’t want to get romantic about it. Union leadership made lots of mistakes. What organization doesn’t? But typically they played all sides for the benefit of their members.

The parties did choose sides. Some supported the labor movement and labor interests and some chose to support capitalists. Most prominently beginning with the Reagan Administration, both the Court and the Republican Party have been doing all they could to shrink, defeat and destroy the labor movement. Part of that was about money. But robbed of unions as intermediaries, workers were on their own to understand how economic policies affected them. Without unions many were pushovers for the likes of Donald Trump, who was closely allied with the wealthiest in America and antagonistic to the needs of workers but convinced them the opposite was true, that they should ignore the press and listen only to him.

In other words, the power of a conman depended on stripping American workers of their own organizations, dedicated to workers’ interests.

Yes, strikes give us all problems, but the absence of labor unions threatens the survival of democratic government and the substitution of government of, by and for the wealthy. In other words, unless you are a captain of industry, you ought to be for labor unions, Grange movements and other organizations of working people. Otherwise, it’s just money talking.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 25, 2023.

The Depravity of Chief Executives

While some people keep trying to “protect” Americans from learning about the worst aspects of America, lawyers have no choice. From the moment we enter law school we are confronted with the best and the worst of America. We have no choice – our job is to deal with it and help others deal with it. One of the first cases we read in my class on criminal law dealt with the trial and conviction of a well-connected Indiana politician and Klan leader for kidnapping, imprisoning, raping and killing a young woman.[1] Once having had our noses rubbed in the cruelty of other people, we look at the world with our eyes open.

Are presidents decent? Some of them. But some were demonstrably corrupt, held slaves, started wars for political purposes that killed enormous numbers of soldiers and civilians and lied about the reasons. I want to believe that presidents are honest, decent, and care about our welfare. But there is nothing automatic about it.

Should chief executives, governors and presidents, be above the law? I shudder to think about the consequences.

Are liars trustworthy?

The Eisenhower Administration initially lied about what Capt. Francis Gary Powers was doing when he was shot down over the Soviet Union. In that case, I understood the diplomatic necessity of Eisenhower’s denial. A “white” lie.

I loved what Johnson did for civil rights but his Administration deceived America about Vietnam.[2] He was also stupid about it – Ho Chi Minh was an admirer of George Washington but it was long after the end of that very bloody war before we realized we could, and now do, trade with Vietnam.

We can disagree about Reagan’s politics, but misleading America about why the hostages weren’t home, while his people were telling Iran not to release them before he took office, was a despicable political ploy that kept people I know and respect incarcerated in Iran – one of them in solitary confinement. Sorry Mr. Reagan, but that was disgusting, even treasonous.

It matters what George Bush told us about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The subsequent war made everything worse in the Middle East, strengthening violent forces in the region, and shifting regional politics against our interests.

Lies and deception screw everything up. They are responsible for the deaths of millions. They poison the air with false explanations and blame the innocent for political reasons. No – Blacks, Jews, Catholics and anti-fascists did not falsify the 2020 election. Just the opposite – Trump begged, threatened and inspired the intimidation of honest election workers and public officials to change the results in plain site, but the pot calls the kettle black and tries to blame everyone else.

Should Trump be tried? For bilking people who’ve worked for him? For fraud? Sexual abuse? Treason? How about adultery? He’s dangerous. Every word out of his mouth makes this country worse, less safe, less able to deal with its problems. Yes, lock him up and remove him from center stage.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 11, 2023.

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[1] Stephenson v. State, 205 Ind. 141, 179 N.E. 633 (1932) and see Karen Abbott, “Murder Wasn’t Very Pretty”: The Rise and Fall of D.C. Stephenson, Smithsonian Magazine, August 30, 2012.

[2] Lieutenant Commander Pat Paterson, U.S. Navy, in The Truth About Tonkin in The Naval History Magazine, concluded “The administration’s zeal for aggressive action, motivated by President Johnson’s election worries, created an atmosphere of recklessness and overenthusiasm in which it became easy to draw conclusions based on scanty evidence and to overlook normally prudent precautionary measures. Without the full picture, Congress could not offer the checks and balances it was designed to provide. Subsequently, the White House carried the nation into the longest and one of the most costly conflicts in our nation’s history.” See also the report in the New York Times.

End the Gun Culture and Take the Court With It

I’ve talked about the short vacation we took to see the Northern Lights, but right now I’m exploding with anger about the latest mass shootings including one that took place just before we left. They’re both awful and very personal. It’s not just the shooters that have my anger but all their protectors.

I left Peace Corps training at the University of Texas in Austin days before Charles Whitman climbed the tower and killed 15 people who happened to be in the area, and injured thirty-one more. I’d been within range of that tower a few days before we left.

We had an exchange student who got her Masters degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia, not long before another mass shooter killed 32 people and wounded 17 others there.

Our daughter got her Ph.D. at Michigan State, thank heavens more than a decade before the latest mass shooting there, shortly before we left.

My former colleague, Sarah Rogerson, had a family member hurt in another Michigan mass shooting.

Anyone in our family or any of our friends could have been in any of those places or many of the places where countless other mass shootings took place, any of those times.

The US used to feel like the safest place in the world. What’s happened to us is tragic.

Whether the shooters were psychologically deranged or in the thrall of some nonsensical conspiracy theory, the political muscle behind letting people have and carry assault weapons comes from gun manufacturers, the NRA, the lingering effects of racism and the Civil War, and from people who romanticize what they call “The Lost Cause”, people who regret not conquering the United States and hate the fact that the States are still United with a functioning government elected by the people. It comes from people who hate African-Americans, think their slavery should not have ended and that our problems stem from the African-American community – now that’s the pot calling kettle black – the mass shooters have been almost all white and my Black friends are not vulnerable to the kinds of nonsensical conspiracy theories that distort the minds of whites trying to refight the Civil War – whites who want to ban the teaching of everything they don’t know because it might blow the lies and distortions out of their weak minds.

There was a time when we banned machine guns. Now we allow ever more powerful weapons developed for war and make them available to those cheering for a war against America.

Most guilty and responsible are the members of the Supreme Court who think the Second Amendment authorizes war on the US. They’re traitors in black robes. I’d try, convict and “lock ‘em up” without the opportunity to communicate beyond the walls of their cells. Their job description calls for justice. Their work stokes Civil War. They’re the Devil’s cabinet and frequently violate the Code of Conduct that applies to the rest of the federal judiciary.

It’s time to ban assault weapons, take guns out of the hands of abusers, require insurance to carry weapons, hunt down the paramilitaries who are determined to destroy our country, and their judicial protectors too. Let the Supreme Court nominations roll.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on March 7, 2023.

Jews Torn by Israeli Behavior

Jews themselves are torn by Israel’s behavior. Many have predicted for decades that Israel could not be Israel and swallow the West Bank. Israel’s “solution” has been to repopulate the West Bank with Israelis and push Palestinians out. Many of us never bought into that “solution”. From what Israelis have told me, Israel made no effort to integrate the populations, to school them together or share space. Israeli policy has been to separate the populations and squeeze the Palestinians out.

That approach has been coming home to roost. Israel appears to be turning itself into an “illiberal bastion of zealotry.” It’s threatening the survival of democracy, quashing the Israeli Supreme Court’s ability to enforce rules, expelling and leaving Palestinians stateless, vulnerable to both settler and official violence, and increasing attacks on civilians. Israel’s been thumbing its nose at American demands to respect Palestinian settlements and preserve a two-state solution. It doesn’t help that Netanyahu’s head of the Office of Jewish Identity doesn’t think most American Jews are Jewish. These policies are very troubling to a large segment of American Jewry. I don’t know whether another solution would work but this has painful consequences.

When I was young, I was outraged by Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. Tit for tat didn’t seem like smart policy but it seemed understandable. Nevertheless, attacks on civilians are absolutely inexcusable. Collective guilt, blaming or penalizing all Palestinians for the violence of some, makes everything worse.

There’s a bigger issue. If tribalism justifies anything for one’s own tribe, and if might makes right, which of our tribes will survive? Only if we can find ways to unite behind justice, equality, and the Golden Rule, loving and respecting our neighbors and fellow human beings, can any of our tribes, ethnic, racial, or religious, survive intact.

The American Founding generation tried to bequeath us that lesson. Their answer to the religious wars that shredded seventeenth century Europe and would again shred the twentieth was the philosophy of the Enlightenment, of universal principles of justice. They sought a road to peace through tolerance and community.

In the great words of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“All” people have those rights though it took a civil war to enshrine those principles in the text of the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, attempting to protect life, liberty and property with equal protection and due process of law, the Fifteenth Amendment attempting to guarantee voting rights to the descendants of those brought here as slaves, and the Nineteenth Amendment finally recognizing women’s right to vote.

We’ll always have vicious people who care nothing for others’ rights, but our defense and attractiveness to the world has always been those universal human rights. We and Israel ignore those rights and support countries which ignore them at our peril and at the peril of our moral responsibility to honor and respect all God’s children.

Having been the victim of Hitler’s Nazi racism in the Holocaust, later euphemized in other contexts as ethnic cleansing, Israel has been engaging in a deal with the devil by trying to swallow the West Bank. It’s a bad deal and the devil is winning.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on February 7, 2023.

What’s “Radical”?

I’d like to ask what’s “radical”? A lot of our political conversation is about what is and is not “extreme” or “radical.” That’s about policy and it’s important. But what does it mean?

Should we avoid being radical by behaving like everyone else? Would we avoid being radical by falling over the cliff like lemmings because other lemmings are doing it too? Is average OK because everyone around us must know what they’re doing? People do things in groups they would never do on their own. Forgive me, but that’s the psychology of mobs, which made storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021 possible; rioters were surrounded by others urging them on. It’s why social media can be poisonous, feeding people steady diets of the violent radicalism they’d already shown interest in. If we are going to survive, we have to do better.

Here’s what I think is radical:

Radical is the environmental change that’s coming if we don’t have a Green New Deal – and fast. It will kill and embitter not only our lives but our children’s and grandchildren’s.

Radical is the racial and ethnic nationalism that threatens to tear this country apart, tear apart the business, infrastructure, labor force, science and education that we’ve been living off and building on.

Radical is letting our health systems fail in the midst of global pandemics. And since climate change feeds and spreads illnesses that a cooler climate used to keep far away from most of us, we will keep having pandemics.

Radical is refusing to defend ourselves from infectious diseases because some people think they know more than scientists who’ve spent their lives studying how to control infectious diseases, even after scientists developed vaccines at “warp speed” that could have saved the lives and health of millions of Americans.

Radical is letting our water systems fail us, so the water isn’t fit to drink, or so that we and our crops are parched by droughts, like the droughts in other countries we’ve sent relief to, except there’ll be no one left to help us here.

Radical is a Supreme Court that won’t lift a finger to guard democracy from politicians intent on defending themselves from the voters by creating voting districts they can’t lose. Radical is a Supreme Court that closes its eyes to the threat of firearms to ourselves, our children, our neighbors and our democracy. Radical is a Supreme Court that considers nothing more sacred than blocking every attempt we make to save ourselves and our country.

Are Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders radical? Many of their proposals, like the Green New Deal, are an effort to conserve what we’ve had and help us build better lives. Is that radical? Or is letting deadly problems fester radical?

The reason why some countries have suffered so cruelly from natural disasters, is that they turned against themselves, fighting each other instead of drought, disease and climate change. If we’re so wrapped up in fighting each other that we can’t address the threats to our very existence as people, families and nation, then we’ll disappear like ancient civilizations without so much as gravestones. Are we better than that? Can we deal with our problems? Or are we just preparing to fall off the cliff so the vultures can pick the dead flesh off our bones?

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on January 17, 2023.

Did You Catch the Grinch?

People are frustrated they and their children aren’t doing as well as their parents. There’s a grinch out there mucking things up. Did you catch it? It’s time to lock it up!

How come our parents’ did well? Education and immigration! !! Think mines and factories were staffed and roads and railroads built by the sons and daughters of the American Revolution? We got immigrants to do the dirty jobs – Chinese, Irish, Poles, all kinds of immigrants plus immigrants lured under false pretenses and then treated like slaves. America burst into an industrial powerhouse beginning with the Civil War when unlimited immigrants came. We bought, ate, rode and drove on what they made. They still want to do all that for the rest of us but we no longer let them. The jobs are different now – including agricultural and essential work – but the needs are still there.

And we used to make sure to educate them. Without education and immigration we’d be subsistence farmers with little to show for our efforts. Before the land grant colleges, authorized during the Civil War and financed with federal investment, our methods of agriculture were medieval. Without both education and immigration there’d be no infrastructure, no industry, no hospitals, no health systems.

The Republican response is cut, block and deport. Block and deport immigrants so there aren’t enough workers and nothing gets done except for complaining about inflation. Send back those who grew up here and let them take their educations somewhere else. They must imagine we’d be healthy if we could keep out all those who want to be our nurses, aides and doctors – you think we graduate enough doctors by ourselves? Silly.

Cut, block and deport. Cut their rich friends’ taxes. Cut every program, starting with Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act that benefits anyone else, and let most of us, including essential workers, squirm. Cut jobs and education because there’s no money. And there’s no money because Republican penny pinchers cut taxes for themselves and their rich friends!

The tax system has been continuously distorted by the wealthiest Americans and their corporations since 1980. The marginal tax rate for average Americans has been about a fifth of their income from 1970 to the present. In 1970, however, the top tax rate for the wealthy, paid only on their top dollars, was 70%. But the maximum tax rate, regardless of earnings, declined to 37% or about 3/8s of however much income they declare, and the wealthy actually pay much less because they have access to tax deductions and loopholes that most of us don’t. Remember Warren Buffet who was outraged to discover that his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did.  No wonder we “can’t afford” anything – can’t afford to repair roads, water systems, or keep schools functioning at the same high level we benefitted from when we and our parents went to school. The grinches are making out like bandits.

Frankly, the wealthy ought to pay more than average Americans. They don’t need those high dollars as much as ordinary Americans need every penny of what they make. And they get a lot more benefits from government. Just ask their lobbyists!

So, did you find the Grinch? Lock it up and ship it out on the big plane Woody Guthrie labeled “Deportees.”

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on January 3, 2023.

Ayesha Rascoe

My commentary over the past few weeks has been driven by the politics – I’ve been worried, upset, and haven’t been sleeping very well, so even though some of us are still working on the election, I want to relax a little and talk about something that’s much more fun.

There’ve been comments about Ayesha Rascoe on the listener comment line. Here’s my take about her.

I certainly hear the African-American accents in her voice. Hallelujah.

I also hear her enthusiasm and I enjoy it.

Let me add that each new NPR voice potentially brings in a new audience to hear the quality of news that NPR provides. That matters.

So let’s back up. NPR has been breaking barriers for the benefit of us all since it was formed. Some of us remember the founding women of NPR – Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg and Cokie Roberts – every one of them savvy, unique, warm, caring voices and every one a woman. I remember meeting Cokie Roberts’ father on a tour of the Capital years ago when he was the House majority leader –  nobody was going to hide the politics from his daughter, Cokie, and I’ve used the Haggadah she and her husband wrote for interfaith families like theirs – and ours. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Nina Totenberg. She’s been a sane and insightful Supreme Court reporter,  covering an institution I’ve studied and written about for decades. I’m all ears when she’s on the air. Linda Wertheimer had family ties to activism for a cleaner politics. I never got a taste for Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish but I loved the warmth in her voice much as I do Scott Simon’s warm voice now. I loved them all.

Warmth matters, by the way. I have never forgotten waking up decades ago to the description of a father wiping leaves off the coffin of his son in Central America as a result of the wars there. It matters that we care.

And it’s been obvious that NPR has continued bringing on reporters and hosts from all religious and family backgrounds – as a former Peace Corps Volunteer I notice those things and I’ve been delighted. NPR isn’t perfect – what human institution could be – but its view of the world is broad and much more helpful than most – which is why I listen. I treasure its diversity of voices and subjects – not just because they’re diverse but because their choices are enlightening. Not merely traditional, they probe and help us to see the world more deeply.

Rascoe is not the first African-American voice on NPR but she is the first that you didn’t have to Google to find out. On television you can see, but on radio you have to hear or be told. Her speech isn’t traditional or familiar for some people but then purists like me shake our fists at people who talk about “this point in time” when they could just have said “now.” Yes, I hate cliches.

Rascoe is no cliché – she’s a breathe of fresh air.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Nov. 15, 2022.

Encouraging Mob Violence Leads to Disaster

A classmate’s lecture asserted Trump’s encouragement of self-appointed armed vigilantes, militias, and MEGA toughs, filled with racism and hostility toward rules of law and order, would blow over. But those guys think they’ve the right to use weapons to make the rest of us to do what they want. Once tasting power people don’t lay it aside easily. Adding prejudice poisons the land. Add weapons and official encouragement, watch out.

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that political violence is nearly a daily phenomenon. The FBI itself has been targeted. Threats against the FBI have spiked, “includ[ing] a bomb threat at FBI headquarters … calls for ‘civil war’ and ‘armed rebellion,’” and a nail gun was fired into one FBI office. The FBI erected additional barriers around its Washington headquarters because of the threats.

Attacks on the courts threaten fair and impartial justice – like the 2020 murder of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas’s son and the shooting of her husband in their family home in New Jersey. Recent violence includes an attack on Justice Kavanaugh’s life and the murder of a retired circuit judge in Wisconsin. Threats against federal judges and their families are “a disturbing trend” and “on the rise….” Some 1,100 serious threats were leveled against one judge for a temporary order on Trump’s first travel ban. 60 Minutes reported a 400% jump in threats to federal judges over five years.

Members of the Congress, governors and other state officials have been attacked and threatened.

• Since 2011, Representative Gabby Giffords was shot and suffered severe brain injury from an assassination attempt; Representative Steve Scalise was shot and seriously wounded by a terrorist; and Representative Rand Paul was tackled from behind, fracturing five ribs.
• Threats to members of Congress doubled since Trump’s 2020 election defeat and continue to soar. One anonymous video showed a man with a gun following Rep. Torres saying “I got something for you.” Another left “a dead rat with a noose around its neck and a brick with a family member’s name” on Rep. Tom Reed’s doorstep.
• On the very morning he was interviewed, Republican Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota reported “one of my offices received a threat against my life” among other threats. “My address, a picture of my home where my family lives was posted on kind of an anti-Dusty Facebook page.”
• Others described their fear of threats to CNN.
• Just a decade earlier, Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle of South Dakota received letters with anthrax spores.

Replacing law, order and democracy, with fear, violence and intimidation endangers everyone. Official encouragement or support aggravate it. Authorities in Franco’s Spain stole children from their parents for money. Drug lords in Columbia and Mexico absorbed forces of law and order. Gangs demand payments or force children to join. Authorities disappeared 43 students in Mexico. Families run away only to be turned down at the US border and forced back. Breakdown of law and order is serious business. Authorities’ ability to act with impunity, as if rules were irrelevant to them, makes everyone slaves. When society gives up on law and order, no funding of police solves the problem.

Storming the Capital disempowers the people. Force, violence and intimidation make us surrender everything that’s precious. That’s where officially encouraged mob violence leads.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on October 18, 2022.

Bequeathed democracy, can we keep it?

How America’s Democracy Is “Ripe to Be Exploited”, by Eric Umansky for ProPublica – well worth reading. And excellent interview with Barbara Walter about her new book, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. I highly recommend it.