insights

One of the more enlightening conversations I have had on the podcast was about sheriffs when I spoke with Max Rose a few months ago. Max Rose is the founder of Sheriffs for Trusting Communities, a group that works with local organizers to help educate people on what sheriffs do and how to hold them accountable.  In that conversation, which you can listen to here, we discussed the surprisingly under-the-radar and unconstrained powers of sheriffs in America today. Because they operate our jails, sheriffs play a key role in the mass incarceration crisis, and in our immigration crisis by cooperating…

Did you hear about the Wall of Moms in Portland, Oregon? These middle-aged ladies in yellow t-shirts and bike helmets made national news when they formed a human barrier to help protect peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters from armed federal agents. The images of these women, sometimes accompanied by “dads” with leaf blowers to help disperse tear gas, were powerful for many reasons, one of which was the disturbing incongruity of seeing women you’d more likely associate with school bake sales or church socials in a semi-military confrontation. Yet there they were, at the heart of the resistance.  The word…

In New Faces of Democracy, I profile all kinds of people and grassroots groups with one thing in common, defeating Trump and his agenda this November. There are activists across the gamut -- candidates and artists, newsletter writers and fundraisers. And then there is one category of activism that focuses on what I call “chipping away at the margins”.  We all know that, in 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. And we also all know that he won the electoral college, and therefore the presidency, by a mere 80,000 votes in three swing states. So the…