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Podcast: The roots of radical partisanship

Podcast: The roots of radical partisanship

Political violence is rising in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats divided along racial and ethnic lines that spurred massive bloodshed and democratic collapse earlier in the nation’s history. The January 6, 2021 insurrection and the partisan responses that ensued are a vivid illustration of how deep these currents run.

How did American politics become so divided that we cannot agree on how to categorize an attack on our own Capitol?


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What Chantal Knew

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What Chantal Knew

In 1972, I taught at a Boston prep school where one of my students, Chantal, had been sent from Haiti by her privileged family to complete her secondary education. She was poised, serious, and ambitious. But what I remember most was her fear — and her warning.

"You Americans don't know how lucky you are," she would say, speaking in hushed tones about people who disappeared without warning under Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's brutal regime. She'd describe how neighbors would simply vanish. Not political activists, just ordinary people who'd said the wrong thing to the wrong person.

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Report: Party control over election certification poses risks to the future of elections
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The Trump Administration’s Efforts To Undermine Election Integrity

The administration’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., on a limited basis tests using the military to overthrow a loss in the midterm elections. A big loss will stymie Project 2025, and impeachment may perhaps loom.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the president have said L.A. is “prelude to what is planned across the country,” according to U.C. Berkeley law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. Chemerinsky reports that on June 8, “Trump said, ‘Well, we’re gonna have troops everywhere.’” The Secretary of Homeland Security recently announced that in L.A., “Federal authorities were not going away but planned to stay and increase operations to ‘liberate’ the city from its ‘socialist’ leadership.”

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Is Trump the Wizard of Oz? Behind the Curtain of Power, Illusion, and a Constitutional Crisis
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Is Trump the Wizard of Oz? Behind the Curtain of Power, Illusion, and a Constitutional Crisis

“He who saves his Country does not violate any law.”

In February 2025, Donald Trump posted a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte on Truth Social, generating alarm among constitutional experts.

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A Wealthy Congress Doesn’t Reflect American Constituents

US Capitol

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A Wealthy Congress Doesn’t Reflect American Constituents

Imagine being told from a young age that your life is already written: the jobs you’ll hold, the obstacles you’ll face, the limits you’ll never cross. What you’re born into is what your life will be. For millions of Americans making a low wage, that’s the reality. Democracy, in theory, is supposed to offer a way out — a chance to shape your own future. That’s the “American dream.” But for too many, it remains just a promise, out of reach. When children grow up believing their circumstances are permanent, they inherit a cycle instead of a chance.

I know this tension firsthand. On paper, I might look like I fit the mold of opportunity: white-passing, educated, and building a career. But beneath the surface, my story goes beyond that. I grew up in a low-income, mixed-race household with a Hispanic father and a white American mother. In my family, the paths laid out were often blue-collar jobs, teen pregnancy, addiction, incarceration, or worse. None of my three sisters graduated from high school, and no one in my immediate family attended college. I became the exception — not because the system was designed for me but because I found a way through it.

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