Caroline Light, professor and researcher at Harvard and the author of “Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair With Lethal Self-Defense,” tells Misfit hosts Bob Schlehuber and Jamarl Thomas that this moment has given her a lot of reason to hope as no time in the recent past has. She discusses the effects of encouraging citizens to carry lethal weapons in public to protect their property, and how the murder of Ahmaud Arbery crystallized centuries of legal discrimination and a culture that reveres whiteness, as well as the role the military has played in suppressing protest.
Steve Grumbine, founder of the nonprofit Real Progressives and host of the podcast Macro n Cheese, explains that oversight of the CARES Act has been criminally negligent and is clearly benefiting the already wealthy rather than suffering American workers. This is a bipartisan robbery of the populace, as usual. He talked about what the real national debt is, how debt-scaring is used to punish the poor, and how debt hawks only end up starving the economy.
Investigative reporter and documentarian Greg Palast, author of “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and the upcoming book “How Trump Stole 2020: the Hunt for America’s Vanished Voters,” describes the police violence he’s seen on the streets of Los Angeles and then breaks down Georgia’s role as a testing ground for different types of vote suppression. Democrats do it too, he warns, but unlike Republicans, they’re trying to suppress their own left-wing voters, a faction that usually breaks down along racial lines. He describes voter suppression efforts he’s witnessed in the recent past, and how voters have successfully challenged some of those efforts.
Karleigh Webb, journalist, videographer and organizer, says the moment we’re in right now in the US is unique, with its closest analogue the post-Civil War labor rights. The coronavirus is helping push this wave of radicalization by showing how vulnerable so many of us are, regardless of our kaleidoscope of individual identities, and the violence meted out by police is showing people who considered themselves untouchable that they, in fact, are not.
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