In this episode, Andre and Todd discuss their different views on the threat of racial violence, whether anyone is capable of being pushed to violence, what’s behind the caution that Andre brings to Black-white relationships, and how canceling each other’s views and experiences impedes our ability to have open, honest conversations about race.
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Alex Edgar Won’t Let Older Generations Off the Hook
Jul 05, 2026
Alex Edgar has heard the line more times than he can count: Gen Z is our hope. Gen Z will fix this. And every time, from panel stages to private conversations, he gives the same answer.
“No, no, no; you’re not getting out of this so easy,” he said. “We have to do this together.”
Young people, he argues, simply don’t hold power in American society in a way that lets them make the changes they’re constantly told to make. And a generation that has watched movement after movement — March for Our Lives, the climate strikes, Black Lives Matter — produce incremental wins that were later rolled back has drawn a hard conclusion: not just that they can’t make change from the outside, but that even inside the institutions, they wouldn’t be allowed to. “The onus is so on our existing leaders to reach out their hands toward our younger leaders,” he said.
Edgar, a member of the Democracy Architects Council fellowship from the Bridge Alliance Education Fund and Civics Unplugged, has spent his young career building the structures that make that handoff possible. As youth engagement manager at Made By Us, he co-founded Youth250, an effort to put young people at the center of America’s 250th anniversary; work that has reached millions, engaged thousands of organizations, and earned him a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for social impact. He is the first Gen Z board member of Points of Light, the youngest-ever appointee to the Census Bureau’s 2030 Advisory Committee, and a Simi Valley, Calif., native who spent his childhood begging his parents to let him quit Cub Scouts. He made Eagle Scout instead.
The through line, he says, was service; a father who taught community college for more than 40 years, a mother deeply involved in the PTA, volunteering “whether I liked it or not” every month of his childhood. The catalyst came in high school, when a mass shooting in the town next door pushed him into organizing, then March for Our Lives, then a citywide youth voter registration drive during the pandemic. At UC Berkeley, where he led campus voter engagement, he grew frustrated that civic engagement had been reduced to voting — so he co-created and taught an undergraduate course, Civic Engagement 101, at the Goldman School of Public Policy to show students everything else it could be.
That instinct for unlikely rooms recently produced one of his most unexpected bylines: a Fox News op-ed on young men, isolation, and service, co-authored with Neil Bush. Edgar knows the topic can read as a culture-war flashpoint, and he refuses to frame it as a zero-sum contest. “Young men and boys not doing well is bad for young women and girls,” he said, arguing the divide is “far more about class than it is gender.”
The 250th anniversary presents a similar trap, and Youth250 was built to walk between its two camps: American pessimism on one side, American exceptionalism on the other. Most Americans, Edgar says, live in between. When his team asked the hundreds of applicants to the Youth250 Bureau a deliberately open question — are you patriotic, why or why not? — the answers refused to sort by politics. The most striking pattern: first- and second-generation immigrants who said their family’s story was exactly why they were so patriotic.
Within the Democracy Architects Council, Edgar describes himself as the only fellow who has worked deep inside the formal democracy field, and he’s come away skeptical of its borders. “Even the fact that there is a democracy space is antithetical to the type of work that we want to be doing,” he said. The field’s weakness, in his telling, is that elite institutions often prize being perceived as experts over elevating the people most directly affected. The council, he believes, is a rare bet in the other direction: trusting young people with visioning, then connecting that vision to people with the resources to act on it.
Asked to finish the sentence “By 2035, American democracy will ___ if we do our jobs,” Edgar didn’t hesitate long: “actually be representative.”
And his ask of anyone reading this is characteristically intergenerational. If you’re young, have a real conversation with an older person you’re not related to, about who they are, not what they think politically. If you’re older, do the reverse. “We are so age-segregated as a country,” he said. “The lack of connection across difference... is one of the most powerful opportunities in our democracy that does not get tapped into.”
The Democracy Architects Council, presented by The Bridge Alliance Education Fund and Civics Unplugged, offers a paid, one-year fellowship for eight fellows ages 18 to 28, each selected for their work across a distinct sector of democratic life.
Kristina Becvar is the executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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America at 250: The Next Expansion of the American Promise
Jul 04, 2026
As the United States approaches its 250th year, we are returning to a ritual as old as the republic itself: the work of taking stock — of measuring the country we have inherited against the country we were promised.
Some look at America today and see a nation in decline, divided by politics, frayed by distrust, unsettled by economic anxiety. Others see its enduring strengths — its genius for invention, its long habit of self-correction, its singular capacity to begin again. Both are describing the same country. For America has never been a finished thing. It has been, from the start, an argument we are still having with ourselves about who belongs.
That is the through-line of American history. Not the steady accumulation of wealth or power, but the steady widening of the circle — the slow, contested, sometimes painful expansion of who gets to participate in the life of the nation. Each generation has been handed that question in its own form, and each has been measured by its answer.
The founders staked everything on a proposition the world called naive: that ordinary people, governing themselves, could do better than kings. The generations that followed spent two centuries proving the proposition by enlarging it. Property requirements fell. Slavery was abolished at terrible cost. Women claimed the vote. And in our own near memory, a movement of ordinary citizens confronted the machinery of segregation and forced the country to honor, at last, the plain words of its founding creed. Time and again, Americans widened the circle of participation and, in doing so, renewed the republic itself.
Few carried that work more faithfully than John Lewis.
Lewis understood that democracy is not a spectator's faith. It is not something a citizen watches; it is something a citizen does. It asks for participation, for sacrifice, for the stubborn belief that the institutions we inherit can be made more just than we found them. He crossed a bridge in Selma knowing what waited on the other side, because he believed the country was capable of becoming what it claimed to be.
His generation expanded the circle of political participation. The task before ours may be to expand the circle of economic participation.
Political rights remain the foundation of everything — but a foundation is not a house. A democracy cannot stand indefinitely while large numbers of its citizens feel they have no stake in its prosperity. A citizen who comes to believe the economy has no place for him will not long
believe the republic has a place for him either. Where participation is promised in principle and denied in practice, faith erodes — first in the market, then in the government, finally in one another.
You can see the erosion across the country. In small towns where opportunity left before young people did. In neighborhoods where ambition runs into barriers that are invisible to anyone who has never had to climb them. In the lives of millions who work hard, raise families, follow the rules, and still cannot say with confidence that the future will offer their children more than it offered them.
We are accustomed to filing these under economics. They are something larger. They are questions about the republic itself — about whether the promise of equal citizenship reaches all the way down to the conditions of an ordinary life, or stops politely at the ballot box.
For the health of a republic has never rested on the right to vote alone. It has rested on whether citizens possess a genuine stake in the future — through ownership, through enterprise, through education, through the ability to build something that outlasts them.
History offers a pattern worth remembering. America's strongest democratic chapters have tended to arrive when the nation deliberately widened the gates of opportunity. The Homestead Act put land in the hands of people who had owned nothing. The GI Bill sent a generation to college and into homes of their own, and built the broadest middle class the world had ever seen. Each was imperfect, and each left people wrongly outside its reach. But each understood a truth we have half-forgotten: that prosperity broadly shared is not charity to the republic — it is the republic's lifeblood.
The question at 250 is what that expansion looks like in our time.
It will not be answered by a single party or a single law. It will require lowering the barriers that keep capable people from rising — the entrepreneur who cannot reach capital, the worker whose skill the system cannot see, the family one opportunity away from a different future. It will require us to recognize what every previous expansion understood: that economic exclusion and democratic decay are not separate diseases, but symptoms of the same one.
Most of all, it will require us to recover a fuller understanding of citizenship itself.
Citizenship is more than voting, though we should vote. It is more than debate, though free people must debate. Citizenship is the conviction that we share responsibility for the institutions we inherit and the opportunities we leave behind.
Every generation holds the country in trust for the next.
That belief has long been one of America's greatest strengths. It is why generations of citizens built schools they would never attend, roads they would never travel, and institutions whose full benefits they would never personally enjoy. They understood that democracy is not merely an arrangement among the living. It is a covenant between generations.
Two hundred and fifty years after its founding, the United States stands not at the end of its story but at the beginning of a new chapter. Two hundred and fifty years on, the next chapter of this country will not be written by its economic statistics or its newest technologies, remarkable as they are.
The question is whether we will continue the oldest work in our national life: the widening of the circle, the enlargement of the promise, the patient labor of making opportunity as broad as citizenship itself.
Every generation inherits an unfinished America.
The duty is not merely to preserve it.
The duty is to widen it.
If those who came before us expanded the promise of political inclusion, ours must expand the promise of economic inclusion. That may prove the defining democratic test of America's third century.
And it may be the truest way we can honor John Lewis — and the long line of Americans who left the circle of opportunity wider than they found it.
Mansur Kasali is a social entrepreneur and founder of EmpowerHer Capital, focused on expanding access to capital and economic opportunity. He is a 2026 recipient of the National Association of Secretaries of State's John Lewis Youth Leadership Award.
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The Façade of the American Dream: Reimagining the next 250 years
Jul 04, 2026
Since the birth of the United States, people have been dreaming of the American "Good Life."
This dream accelerated after the Industrial Revolution arrived in the U.S. in the 1800s. Innovative manufacturing practices integrated new technologies, lowering costs and spurring economic growth. As a result, millions of people gained access to affordable consumer goods. These changes improved living standards, making the dream attainable for more people.
As the nation celebrates its first 250 years, it’s time to examine the overall impact of modern conveniences on Americans’ quality of life.
However, these advancements also have unforeseen consequences. Mass production of household goods reduces manufacturing costs, making products more affordable. Unfortunately, researchers have found that some components of some products are toxic to human health.
Industrial manufacturing decisions prioritize cost and efficiency to drive strong consumer demand. Manufacturers often overlook potential health risks to keep prices low.
People often choose products that emit toxic pollutants indoors without realizing the harm they can cause. The fact that these chemicals build up in the body and cause long-term health problems is a troubling irony of modern life.
Initially, modern products seemed useful and convenient. Later, researchers found that many household goods
emit vapors or particles that pollute indoor air.
Unlike outdoor pollutants, which people can see or smell, indoor pollutants are invisible and odorless. Kumar et al. conducted a study on indoor air quality, reporting that it can be up to 10 times more polluted than outdoor air.
Each year, there are an estimated three to five million premature deaths linked to indoor air pollution worldwide. This issue poses a significant health crisis that demands urgent attention.
These global findings became personal to me. I learned that household contaminants might have caused my cancer and the loss of my kidney. This experience showed the urgency of addressing these risks.
Indoor air contains highly toxic heavy metals. Even in small amounts, these elements—such as mercury, cadmium, and lead—do not degrade. Once inhaled, ingested, or absorbed, these metals accumulate in vital organs. This buildup causes serious health problems like cancer, kidney damage, and immune dysfunction.
New research examines how toxins, including heavy metals, interact with human biology. Dr. Bruce Lanphear explains that chemicals can disrupt the body’s master switches—key regulatory mechanisms. These disruptions trigger biological reactions, causing chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke, and cancer.
Common household products expose people to dangerous heavy metals. Mercury, a liquid metal at room temperature, is a contaminant in seafood and cosmetics. Batteries and various foods also contain cadmium, which is another toxic metal.
Industries release 5.4 million tons of lead annually. Although lead is a toxic metal that contaminates air, food, and water, it is still used to make some jewelry and toys. This widespread exposure causes an estimated $50 billion in annual health-related costs. According to the National Library of Medicine, no level of lead is safe.
The U.S. federal government regulates heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium, and lead by setting toxicity thresholds. But these limits ignore the immediate and long-term health risks of low-level exposures. Current rules don’t stop health and economic harm. Americans need strict bans on these materials to protect future generations.
Individual consumer choices must drive the push for bans on these toxic metals. Consumers must demand a shift away from products containing heavy metals. By doing so, Americans can force manufacturers to adapt even before federal regulations take effect.
A personal commitment is essential to make these stricter policies work in practice. Choosing non-toxic household products reduces daily exposure to these dangerous substances.
When I replaced my carpet, I found many companies offering non-toxic materials and padding. I chose a healthy carpet option with no chemical smell after installation. My experience showed that safe alternatives are widely available. I plan to continue this transition by using non-toxic coatings when I resurface the wood floors throughout my home.
Recent research shows that living in a greener environment lowers the risk of heart disease and mental health issues. Using natural elements indoors can also reduce stress, improve mood, and enhance thinking skills.
To improve personal health and environmental sustainability, people should reconsider their consumer habits. Consumers can choose natural, sustainable fibers such as bamboo, jute, and hemp for flooring, carpets, and drapery.
The market for eco-friendly furnishings is growing as people seek healthier options. Consider researching and investing in non-toxic brands that prioritize personal and environmental health.
Replacing all toxic items in a home at once can be expensive. Instead, replace toxic products with natural alternatives one at a time. Bamboo comforters and bath towels, jute welcome mats, and hemp pillows are all excellent, sustainable options.
Americans must understand the risks of indoor pollution and embrace sustainable choices. Everyone can live the "Good Life" by redefining the American Dream for future generations.
Carole Rollins has been an environmental educator for 35 years, holds a Ph.D. in environmental science, and has taught environmental education at the University of California, Berkeley. Carole has received the White House Millennium Green Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Public Education and Awareness Award.
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Thoughts on an Anniversary
Jul 04, 2026
As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
In small towns across the nation, in accordance with ours of Madison New Jersey, we will gather to recognize an anniversary. Though this milestone has been one of many, I ask that it not be a mere nod to the curiosities of the past, but the spark of an ongoing admiration for all that led us here.
Our founding fathers through incredible strife composed a nation they saw fit for those they would never meet, and 250 years ago took the declarative act of rolling that idea into motion. Setting in stride a sort of imperfect waltz that has bridged the generations.
From our brilliant triumphant stands to our bittersweet sacrifices to times mired in the trouble and chaos of ill decision. And amidst the growing distractions and ample conveniences of modern life, it can be difficult to recall these struggles. But as the years have mounted higher we now find ourselves the tailors and seamstresses of this great tapestry. And as we weave our portion may we do so with care to those neighbors binding us on this great timeline. And sift among their aging and rusted heirlooms with the veneration of a dutiful curator. Keeping alive those voices that reside in our countries keep.
May we remember with honesty the people who played their role in those years, whether they be doers of just or unjust actions. For the sole act of having been where we now are, they remain our most valuable counsel to navigate what may come. we cannot let ourselves be the ones who cutoff our future countrymen, from those cables of communication which we have had the privilege to hear. For we too shall have been where others will stand as time does what it will.
On this anniversary, We arrive at this 250th year not at a culmination, but as an active set of hands entrusted with holding, for a short while an idea that may never be finished yet must always be maintained.
John Cerutti, 24, Madison, NJ
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