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Podcast: what can Black History Month teach us about the legacy & future of civil rights?

Podcast: what can Black History Month teach us about the legacy & future of civil rights?

Black History Month is a celebration of the remarkable contributions of Black Americans to our nation. We share some personal thoughts and stories about the lessons of history, with extracts from past podcasts and a Common Ground Committee public event. We learn about the legacy of the civil rights movement, and recent calls for social change, justice, reform, and respect.

This episode features “ Let’s Find Common Ground ” podcast guests: Professor Ilyasah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X and the author of the memoir Growing Up X; Dr. Brian Williams, Associate Professor of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center; Hawk Newsome, Cofounder and Chair of Black Lives Matter Greater New York; Errol Toulon, Jr., Ed.D., the first African-American Sheriff of Suffolk County, New York; and Caroline Randall Williams, a poet, author, teacher and Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.


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Time to Toughen Up: Democrats Face a Crossroads

Democrats Donkey lifts weights

Time to Toughen Up: Democrats Face a Crossroads

As the 2026 midterms loom, a simmering debate within Democratic circles has reached a boiling point: Should the party abandon the moral high ground and play political hardball?

In recent years, Democrats have leaned heavily on the ethos of civility and hope—famously embodied by Michelle Obama’s 2016 rallying cry, “When they go low, we go high.” But with the GOP embracing increasingly combative rhetoric and tactics, some strategists argue it’s time for Democrats to recalibrate their messaging—and their muscle.

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Trump’s Drug Price Ultimatum and the Rise of Enemy Politics
shallow focus photography of prescription bottle with capsules

Trump’s Drug Price Ultimatum and the Rise of Enemy Politics

In an era increasingly defined by transactional politics, the rhetoric of ultimatum has become one of President Donald Trump's favorite tools. When he declared to pharmaceutical giants on August 1st, "We will deploy every tool in our arsenal" should they fail to lower drug prices, it echoed a familiar pattern of the use of "demand" to shift from negotiation to confrontation. Trump's all-too-familiar pattern of prescribing with deadlines, threats of tariffs or sanctions, and appeals to fairness or national pride.

In his letter to 17 major drug manufacturers, Trump demanded that drug manufacturers slash prices to match "most favored nation" levels—the lowest rates offered in other developed countries. He emphasized that Americans are "demanding lower drug prices and they need them today." His language, though cloaked in populist concern, carried a veiled threat:

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The Billionaire War on Democracy

The White House is being swallowed up by a wave of money

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The Billionaire War on Democracy

It doesn’t take a conspiracy to dismantle democracy — just concentrated wealth and time.

Across the globe, but especially in the United States, the ultra-wealthy have learned to bend democratic institutions not through revolution or coups d’état, but through slow but determined erosion. They don’t storm the halls of power; they sponsor those halls, sue them if they resist, and slowly discredit them if they persist. They present themselves to the public and a pliant media as hardnosed realists and pragmatists — people who know how to get things done – rational actors disillusioned with what they denounce as ‘the inefficiencies of self-rule.’ But what they’re really doing is waging a cold and relentless war on the very machinery of democratic life.

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