Season 1 Episode 2 The
problem
with Freedom

Americans don't agree on much these days, but one thing we do all know from our dads watching those creepy war documentaries on the History Channel is that freedom is not free. It requires sacrifice. It'd be wonderful if we could all share that load. But unfortunately a big chunk of us are too busy yelling about mask mandates and putting horse dewormer up our butts to focus on the most important thing: Our democracy is on a ventilator, and if we let it "do its own research" and can't resuscitate it we won't have any freedoms left to fight over.

In this episode we learned from journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa that there are three pillars we really have to uphold if we want to keep democracy from falling face-first into the dirt: Guardrails on technology, support of independent journalism, and civic engagement in communities.

You may have noticed that America's got some serious problems in all three of these areas! So if we want to start crab-walking away from authoritarianism, we need to start actively protecting these pillars from the daily onslaught of little attacks by those who want to consolidate their own power. We haven't been doing a great job of standing up to them so far, so we might wanna think about getting our collective act together before we find ourselves living in Trump's America 2.0: A Meta Facebook Production.