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Podcast: Civil Squared new year compilation episode

Podcast: Civil Squared new year compilation episode

In order to make 2022 a better year, we revisited some of the best ideas we heard in 2021 because we think you’ll be able to apply them in the new year and beyond.

Through the course of last year, we talked to interesting and thoughtful guests on several topics, including, among others: how to handle bigots and snowflakes, the wide-reaching impacts of education policy, internet censorship, race and diversity, what it means to be American, why it’s ok to speak your mind, healthcare innovation and policy reform, immigration, factors that make college so expensive, ideological diversity and the importance of having conversations with those who are different than you, political polarization, criminal justice reform and the need for compassion toward formerly incarcerated individuals, the high costs of incarceration, transitional justice theory, tools to understand and navigate media bias, bridging divides, and the importance of preserving the ability for America to self-govern.


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U.S. President Donald Trump on February 13, 2026 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

(Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Autocracy for Dummies

Everything Donald Trump has said and done in his second term as president was lifted from the Autocracy for Dummies handbook he should have committed to memory after trying and failing on January 6, 2021, to overthrow the government he had pledged to protect and serve.

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Rev. Jesse Jackson announces his candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination, 11/3/83.

Getty Images

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The death of Rev.Jesse Jackson is more than the passing of a civil rights leader; it is the closing of a chapter in America’s long, unfinished struggle for justice. For more than six decades, he was a towering figure in the struggle for racial equality, economic justice, and global human rights. His voice—firm, resonant, and morally urgent—became synonymous with the ongoing fight for dignity for marginalized people worldwide.

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Getty Images, PeopleImages

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In his farewell column to The New York Times readers, Brooks wrote, “The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.”

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U.S. Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem during a meeting of the Cabinet in the Cabinet Room of the White House on January 29, 2026 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Collective Punishment Has No Place in A Constitutional Democracy

On January 8, 2026, one day after the tragic killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, held a press conference in New York highlighting what she portrayed as the dangerous conditions under which ICE agents are currently working. Referring to the incident in Minneapolis, she said Good died while engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism.”

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