Are calls for unity too weak and too generic to move Americans? What are the hard truths that stand in the way of unity?
Educator, activist, and author Tim Shriver joined the Braver Angels podcast to talk about his new book, "The Call to Unite," and the budding nationwide movement to unite America.
The Call to Unite | Tim Shriver with John Wood, Jr. & April Lawsonwww.youtube.com
A team of
As we look back on 1776 after this July 4th holiday, it's a good opportunity to skip forward and predict what our forebears will think of us. When our descendants assess our policies, ideas, and culture, what will they see? What errors, born of myopia, inertia, or misplaced priorities, will they lay at our feet regarding today's revolutionary technology—artificial intelligence? From their vantage point, with AI's potential and perils laid bare, their evaluation will likely determine that we got at least ten things wrong.
One glaring failure will be our delay in embracing obviously superior AI-driven technologies like autonomous vehicles (AVs). Despite the clear safety benefits—tens of thousands of lives saved annually, reduced congestion, enhanced accessibility—we allowed a patchwork of outdated regulations, public apprehension, and corporate squabbling to keep these life-saving machines largely off our roads. The future will see our hesitation as a moral and economic misstep, favoring human error over demonstrated algorithmic superiority.
They will also criticize our stubborn refusal to integrate AI-based policy forecasting into our legislative processes. While AI models could have analyzed the long-term societal and economic impacts of proposed laws, helping us anticipate unintended consequences and optimize for human flourishing, we largely relied on antiquated, human-limited methods. This neglect meant our policies often lagged behind technological change, undermining the very notion of effective, responsive governance.
Crucially, they will likely question our failure to establish new intellectual property frameworks even after it became evident that current copyright and patent laws disproportionately favored incumbents and no longer served their intended purpose in the age of AI. Contemporary delay reinforced monopolies, rather than fostering a vibrant, decentralized ecosystem of innovation that truly benefited independent creators and inventors.
The future will equally lament our oversight in adjusting our schools and workforce development programs. They will see our delay in instituting widespread AI literacy for the general public as a critical blunder. We did not take the requisite steps to equip citizens with the fundamental understanding to navigate an AI-saturated world—to ensure they had access to the latest tools, discern AI-generated misinformation, and grok the foundational technical aspects of AI so that they could contribute to AI policy conversations. This lapse compromised our collective pursuit of an informed, participatory democracy. Compounding this, our sluggishness in adjusting reskilling and upskilling programs meant we left vast segments of the workforce vulnerable to displacement, rather than proactively empowering them with the skills to thrive alongside AI.
Perhaps more fundamentally, they will indict our failure to see data sharing as a social good. In an era where data is the new oil (or even the new water!), we allowed its collection and control to remain highly fragmented and proprietary. We did not establish robust, ethical frameworks for data cooperatives or public data trusts that could have fueled innovation for the common good—in healthcare, urban planning, and scientific research.
From an innovation perspective, the future will see our lack of sufficient investment in basic AI research as a monumental strategic error. Our focus skewed heavily towards optimizing existing models, rather than dedicating resources to more elementary inquiries that could uncover the next generation of transformative AI systems. This shortsightedness potentially limited humanity's long-term scientific and technological trajectory. This misallocation of resources will be underscored by our prioritization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) over the development and deployment of robust, beneficial generic AI applications. The speculative pursuit of an arbitrary, unspecified goal often overshadowed the immense, tangible benefits that could have been realized through focused development of practical, specialized AI solutions for pressing societal problems.
Finally, our descendants will not forgive our inadequate investment in public digital infrastructure and universal access. As AI became a foundational layer for economic opportunity and civic life, we allowed a significant digital divide—now an algorithmic abyss—to persist, denying equitable access to the very tools needed to participate in the new economy. From places like New Braunfels, Texas, to rural Virginia, the future will look at our massive, energy-hungry data centers and transmission lines and ask why we also showed a lack of adequate support for the communities disrupted by the immense physical requirements of AI development. These energy-intensive facilities placed environmental and social burdens on local populations without integrating them into the AI ecosystem's benefits.
As things stand, the ledger of future complaints against us concerning AI will be long. But this prophecy need not be our destiny. By confronting these potential failures now, by prioritizing sustained innovation and adaptive governance, we can still pivot towards a future where AI serves humanity's highest aspirations. The time for foresight and courageous action is now, before the future passes its final judgment.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.
A Voice of America sign is displayed outside of their headquarters at the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building on June 17, 2025 in Washington, DC.
The Trump administration has accomplished something that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other dictators desired. It destroyed the Voice of America.
Until mid-March, VOA had been on the air continuously for 83 years. Starting in 1942 with shortwave broadcasts in German to counter Nazi propaganda, America’s external voice had expanded to nearly 50 languages, with a weekly combined audience of more than 350 million people worldwide, watching on TV, listening on radio, with a weekly combined audience of more than 350 million people around the world watching on TV, listening on radio or viewing its content online or through social media apps.
VOA was unique from the beginning. It vowed not to be a propaganda service. It would deliver news and information, whether it was good or bad. Over the decades, Congress passed and presidents signed legislation ensuring that VOA would not be the voice of the party, and presidents signed, legislation ensuring VOA would not be the voice of which political party was in power, nor would the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department be able to censor its content. VOA had a mandate to be fair and balanced.
In my 20+ years reporting for the Voice of America, mainly from Asia, we always stressed accuracy over speed. As many as three editors would pour over our scripts and texts to ensure they were free from bias. No one ever asked me to spin a story a certain way.
Near the end of the first Trump administration, as one of VOA’s high-profile correspondents (I was White House bureau chief), political appointees targeted me for retaliation when I led colleagues in fighting attempts to breach our sacrosanct journalism firewall. Subsequent court rulings and investigations by the Office of Special Counsel and the State Department’s inspector general backed us up and concluded that the political appointees at our parent agency, U.S. Agency for Global Media, conducted an illegal witch hunt. (This is detailed in my book: Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalists Story of Covering the President – and Why It Matters.).
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, written during the interregnum between the two Trump presidencies, unveiled a blueprint to bring VOA’s perceived liberals to heel. It suggested an end to VOA’s autonomy and having it placed under the State Department or the National Security Council.
Even before any of the Trump appointees returned to USAGM, incumbent management at VOA sought to appease the White House. Stories were spiked and headlines massaged. Those were subtle changes unnoticed externally. More overt pre-emptive obedience: suspending me from reporting as VOA’s chief national correspondent and removing Patsy Widakuswara from her position (she was my successor as White House bureau chief). Media critics noted that Patsy and I had been vociferous in opposing attempted partisan interference in VOA’s reporting in 2020 when the Trump appointees belatedly sought to tear up the broadcaster’s charter and tear down its firewall.
Just as Neville Chamberlain found out after 1938, appeasement is interpreted by enemies as weakness.
Firing the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, the president appointed as a USAGM “special advisor” a former TV broadcaster from Arizona who had twice failed to win statewide office, Kari Lake. She initially promised “reform” at VOA to eliminate the supposed radical left bias and remove imaginary internal security risks.
Lake herself, however, was big-footed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Two weeks after Patsy and I were sidelined, DOGE wiped out VOA. All 1,350 staffers were placed on leave with pay. Radio and TV broadcasts went silent. Our news websites were no longer updated. Leases for content distribution worldwide were canceled.
Patsy became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Lake and USAGM figureheads to reverse what we contend were illegal actions, executive branch overreach, and viewpoint discrimination. It is possible we will ultimately prevail in federal court, but our audiences are already gone, with Chinese and Russian media outlets filling the void.
If the U.S. government is not mandated to restore international broadcasting or if Congress votes to eliminate such funding, what is the path forward?
At an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, establishing a replacement VOA would drain the bank accounts of most potential philanthropists. Would benefactors even step forward to fund programming for a few geo-strategic languages in which the BBC does not broadcast, such as Khmer, Shona, or Tibetan?
It is also challenging to develop a commercial-driven structure for languages and others, such as Rohingya, for which VOA was the exclusive external source.
The likeliest replacement sponsors: other leading democracies. If not the British, perhaps Australia, Canada, or Japan – or the European Union? The EU has mulled funding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Australia, Canada, and the UK, however, face domestic political pressure to reduce what remains of their foreign language services.
Lake, meanwhile, quickly changed her tune to support the DOGE's destructive acts. VOA could no longer be reformed. It was unsalvageable and a “rotten fish” spewing anti-American propaganda, an assertion that could be refuted by bothering to actually view, listen to and read VOA’s staid content, very similar in approach and tone to that of the Associated Press (which also became a Trump administration target for punishment for not accepting the White House’s unilateral move to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”)
Clearly, any entity not parroting administration talking points was now unacceptable. And it was unthinkable to have a government-funded independent media outlet, even if it had been an effective instrument of American soft power and public diplomacy over the decades and helped contribute to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Public broadcasters NPR and PBS would also come into the crosshairs with cuts to federal funding, while the Federal Communications Commission would be weaponized to bring domestic broadcasters into line by threatening to revoke their FCC licenses.
The actions resemble developments in other fragile democracies, including India, Hungary, the Philippines, Serbia, and Turkey, where press freedoms eroded under the guise of national security or so-called media reform, with aspiring authoritarians intimidating and discrediting journalists. To consolidate power, these leaders are compelled to control the narrative and minimize dissent. The casualties are accountability and democratic institutions.
Steve Herman retired as VOA’s chief national correspondent on June 30, 2025, to accept a position as the executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at the University of Mississippi.
President Donald Trump said on Friday that he has ended trade talks with Canada and will soon announce a new tariff rate for that country, as stated in a Truth Social post.
The decision to end the months-long negotiations came after Canada announced a digital service tax (DST) that Trump called “a direct and blatant attack on our Country.”
“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately. We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period,” he wrote.
"We'll continue to conduct these complex negotiations in the best interest of Canadians," Prime Minister Mark Carney said. He did not respond to questions about whether his government is prepared to drop the DST — an action the Business Council of Canada is calling for in exchange for U.S. tariff relief.
Beginning on June 30, the DST would require U.S. companies, such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber, and Airbnb, to pay a 3% levy on revenue from Canadian users. The policy will apply retroactively, leaving U.S. companies with a $ 2 billion bill.
The DST tug-of-war between Canada and the U.S. has been ongoing for years, with former President Joe Biden's ambassador to Canada, David L. Cohen, warning during his tenure that if a DST were enacted, the U.S. would retaliate.
While Canada and other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries had been discussing some global DST, the Justin Trudeau administration decided to move ahead with its own tax rather than wait for coordinated action.
What is the digital services tax (DST)?
Here are just the facts:
A digital services tax (DST) is a tax levied on the gross revenues generated from certain digital activities within a jurisdiction. It is not an income tax, online sales tax, or VAT.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum. He is also the publisher of the Latino News Network.
Since the development of American mass media culture in the mid-20th century, numerous examples of entertainment media have tried to improve attitudes towards those who have traditionally held little power.
Entertainment has been used for decades to improve attitudes toward other groups, both in the U.S. and abroad. One can think of movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, helping change attitudes toward Black Americans, or TV shows like Rosanne, helping humanize the White working class. Efforts internationally show that media can sometimes improve attitudes toward two groups concurrently.
Substantial research shows that Americans now hold overly negative views of those across the political spectrum. Let's now learn from decades of experience using entertainment to improve attitudes of those in other groups—but also from counter-examples that have reinforced stereotypes and whose techniques should generally be avoided—in order to improve attitudes toward fellow Americans across politics. This entertainment can allow Americans across the political spectrum to have more accurate views of each other while realizing that successful cross-ideological friendships and collaborations are possible.
In this article, we document a brief history of entertainment used to improve the attitudes of other groups (along with some misfires, including when trying to portray White, working-class men). We then highlight those in the Arts and a few organizations including our own, More Like US, working to use entertainment to reduce perceived U.S. political divides. Despite promising initial work, many more groups and individuals are needed to contribute across many entertainment platforms.
Numerous successful U.S. entertainment efforts to improve attitudes toward groups with little historical power
Since the development of American mass media culture in the mid-20th century, allowing most Americans access to the same media, numerous examples of entertainment media have tried to improve attitudes towards those who have traditionally held little power. In this case, we mean any group other than straight, white men. This said, some entertainment media reinforced stereotypes, but at least there are many fairly successful examples that challenged stereotypes and likely changed attitudes among many in the American public.
This is perhaps most evident in the work of screenwriter Norman Lear, who was instrumental in improving misperceptions of these traditionally less-powerful groups, specifically women and Black Americans. Maude was centered around a woman, unique for sitcoms in the 1970s, and portrayed Maude as opinionated, strongly advocating for women’s liberation and civil rights, dispelling notions that women could not be politically involved or opinionated. Additionally, The Jeffersons, another Norman Lear sitcom from a similar era (1975-1985), was revolutionary in portraying a Black family as wealthy business owners, helping dispel common negative stereotypes of Black Americans.
Another example goes farther back in time to WWII. Beginning with a 1942 song, the Rosie the Riveter propaganda campaign, mainly remembered for its posters, worked to dispel notions that women could only be homemakers. Through its portrayal of Rosie, this campaign encouraged women to take part in the war effort in less traditionally feminine roles such as factory work.
In the late 1960s, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner portrayed an interracial couple in a positive light, at a time when only around 20% of Americans approved of interracial relationships and there was significant stigma around the presence of Black Americans in “White” society.
Will & Grace, a sitcom that began airing shortly before the turn of the 21st century, was deeply impactful on a different front. The show’s portrayal of Will as a gay man who seemed relatable and non-threatening helped to improve negative perceptions of gay men in contemporary America. Straight viewers without contact with gay people in real life saw straight characters positively interact with gay characters. As a result, 60% of viewers reported that “watching the show led to positive perceptions of gay people,” and 71% of viewers rejected the statement that “heterosexual relationships are the only ‘normal’ relationships,” compared with 45% of non-viewers, according to research cited by Bridge Entertainment Labs.
More recently, Marvel’s Black Panther franchise is notable for its unique portrayal of a Black society that was incredibly wealthy, powerful, and technologically advanced. The TV show Modern Family (2009-2020), meanwhile, positively portrayed non-traditional families and members of the LGBTQ+ community, winning over 20 Emmys for its work.
Despite all these generally positive portrayals of groups who have historically held less power, it would be a stretch to say that these groups have always been portrayed well or sufficiently. A reality show like Cops or scripted shows like The Wire often showed ethnically minority men as criminals, and movements like #OscarsSoWhite showed that non-White representation on film proceeded fairly slowly.
But thankfully, there are many portrayals in entertainment of historically less powerful communities that challenge dangerous misperceptions and help create more positive views of them.
Entertainment portrayals of white, working-class men have been pretty bad, though not uniformly terrible
In addition to looking at portrayals of groups historically without much power, we analyze portrayals of those historically with power, namely straight, white men. Because this is such a broad category, and we care about politics, we focus our attention on working-class white men. This group is defined as those without a college degree, often portrayed as working blue-collar jobs. According to 2024 NBC exit polls in 10 key states, white men without a college degree voted for Trump over Harris 69% to 29%, representing almost a fifth of the electorate in those states.
Many of these portrayals also inaccurately represent members of this traditionally more powerful group (though many in this group have experienced and/or felt loss of economic power and social status in recent decades). American media has consistently not been sufficient in portraying the struggles and humanity of working-class white men.
A clear example of this comes from a screenwriter praised earlier in this piece, Norman Lear. All in The Family (1971-1979) is one of the most well-known sitcoms of all time. Yet the main character, Archie Bunker, while humanized to some extent, is portrayed as uneducated and stereotypically bigoted, creating a mostly unflattering and one-sided picture of working-class white men.
Thinking of the cartoon sitcom The Simpsons, which is still running after more than 35 years, Homer never went to college, and he is largely portrayed as a stupid oaf, with infrequent bright spots in his character. On the same show, Cletus is portrayed even worse as a “slack-jawed yokel.”
A variety of reality shows do portray white, working-class men, but usually more as rural or brawny stereotypes than particularly well-rounded characters. This includes the Robertson family from Duck Dynasty (2012-2017) or those in reality shows including Ice Road Truckers (2007-2017) and the ongoing 20-year run of Deadliest Catch about Alaskan crab fishermen.
One of the few arguable bright spots in terms of portrayals of white, working-class men just went off the air. The character of blue-collar Dan Conner first appeared as the male lead in the TV show Roseanne (1988-1997) and then its spin-off The Conners, which aired its last episode in April after seven years on broadcast TV. Negative stereotypes are distinctly less pronounced in Dan Conner than in All in the Family’s Archie Bunker. Dan is portrayed as relatively traditional and hesitant about social change in both the original show and its spinoff, but he also shows vulnerability and commitment to family life in many cases, challenging some stereotypes of white, working-class men. Writer and Executive Producer of The Conners Dave Caplan has thought deeply about the importance of portrayals in entertainment and even has a graduate degree in media psychology.
In all, while sometimes functioning to humanize working-class white men, much entertainment misrepresents working-class white men as overwhelmingly bigoted and/or unintelligent in basically anything other than blue-collar skills, perpetuating harmful stereotypes. This largely has the opposite effect of many of the shows noted earlier in the article, many of which actively work to correct harmful stereotypes of those with traditionally less power.
International efforts show how attitudes toward two groups can be improved simultaneously
There does not need to be a negative portrayal of one group to create positive portrayals of another group. This is apparent in international efforts to improve negative portrayals of certain demographics.
One example is Radio La Benevolencija (RLB), which has worked in various countries, especially in Africa. We will focus on its work in Rwanda, which was created to reconcile differences, heal from the Rwandan Genocide, and prevent another genocide from happening. The programs within the project were created to be entertaining but informative and appeal to a wide variety of audiences.
In RLB’s main Rwandan program, New Dawn, two communities directly paralleling the Hutus and Tutsis lived side by side and were in conflict over a land shortage. The show directly parallels the lead-up to the genocide, as well as the aftermath, without directly referencing the genocide.
In a research paper on RLB, Elizabeth Levy Paluck argued that the program “did not change listeners’ personal beliefs but did substantially influence listeners’ perceptions of social norms.” These norms actually influenced behavior, as listeners changed their behaviors in terms of “active negotiation, open expression about sensitive topics, and cooperation.”
Radio La Benevolencija has made significant strides in healing misperceptions of different ethnic groups, proving the effectiveness of entertainment in concurrently reducing harmful stereotypes of more than one group. Another organization, Search for Common Ground, also has pursued similar efforts in countries including Yemen, Sierra Leone, and Nepal.
Current initial efforts to use entertainment to improve cross-partisan attitudes in the U.S.
To a certain extent, entertainment is already being used to reduce political misperceptions and subsequent divides in the U.S. An upcoming romantic comedy, The Elephant in The Room, tells the story of a progressive and a Trump supporter who try to bridge the gap between their worldviews as they date.
There is also an abundance of short-form content with this aim. In the YouTube video “Cats, Anyone? Finding What We Have in Common When Ideology Divides Us” from NationSwell, two Americans of opposing political viewpoints bond over a shared love for cats. And in the Heineken advertisement “Worlds Apart,” people with contradictory views on different topics find common ground before discussing their differences over a shared beer.
Several organizations are also using entertainment to bridge the gap between those of different viewpoints. Bridge Entertainment Labs, cited earlier for their research into the connection between entertainment media and misperceptions, is working to tell the stories of real Americans of a wide variety of backgrounds in order to contribute to national unity and create a sense of connections between Americans of different political affiliations. The work of Bridge Entertainment Labs, specifically in its whitepaper, aligns closely with the claims made in this article.
PopShift works with major Hollywood studios to connect producers and writers with experts in order to facilitate more accurate representations of those of diverse backgrounds and reduce misperceptions towards certain groups of Americans. Part of the work of Resetting the Table involves training those in Hollywood to have storylines with characters that have “investigated their differences openly and come out the other side,” using tools most influenced by Transformative Mediation, in order to ultimately create a more cohesive America. Braver Angels Music, meanwhile, trains songwriters and musicians to write songs that can bridge political divides, while also providing a space for songwriters to develop material and get to know each other.
The organizations listed above do essential work in bridging the gap between the perceptions Americans hold of those of different political affiliations and the true situations and beliefs of Americans of varying political affiliations. This work aligns with our organization’s, More Like US, initiative to re-CAST fellow Americans in a positive light as more complex, admirable, similar, and worthy of togetherness than expected.
Nevertheless, these efforts are currently small and scattered. Much more of this work is needed in such a large country as the U.S. In today’s decentralized and balkanized media environment, content that improves attitudes toward each other across politics needs to appear not only in TV and movies but in all sorts of entertainment, including social media videos, music, books, plays, and visual art.
Conclusion: Let’s learn from history to create entertainment that improves attitudes of each other across politics
There is a long history of entertainment being used to correct misperceptions of groups that have historically held less power. Entertainment media has proven time and time again its capacity to debunk harmful stereotypes and bridge gaps between people of different backgrounds. Entertainment has unfortunately also reinforced or exacerbated stereotypes in many cases, but these instances can be used as counter-examples of what to generally avoid going forward.
This history serves as an essential guide to fixing modern problems. Americans hold exaggerated negative views of those of different political affiliations. Entertainment media is essential in closing the gap between the truth and these exaggerated negative views. Initial efforts are going in the right direction, but many more people across many entertainment mediums need to create vastly more content. By correcting misperceptions and promoting connection and collaboration between those of different viewpoints, entertainment has the potential to reduce perceived partisan divides and create a more unified America.
James Coan is the co-founder and executive director of More Like US. Coan can be contacted at James@morelikeus.org
Sara Weinstein is a current intern at More Like US.
