If you work hard in the United States, there is no limit to the possibility of what you might achieve. That’s the American Dream. But the reality is that America today increasingly resembles aristocratic societies of the past, which were characterized by little social mobility and dramatic inequality perpetuated in part by the passage of enormous fortunes from one generation to the next. How and why this has occurred in the United States is largely the result of power, politics, and policy...

Rebekah Mercer may be the most powerful woman in conservative politics today, and she’s never held--and probably will never run for--elected office. Since 2004, Rebekah Mercer has been the director of the Mercer Family Foundation, which means for nearly twenty years she has been one of the key people who is in charge of how her father Robert Mercer’s vast fortune is spent. And following the Citizens United decision in 2010, millions of dollars of that vast fortune have been dedicated to...

Mayor Pete is now Secretary Buttigieg, which means that the former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is now a member of the Biden Administration. A surprisingly popular presidential candidate in 2020, Buttigieg has an unusual story, and in just a few years, he’s gone from planning bike lanes and roundabouts to overseeing the nation’s highways, airports, and more. Buttigieg has already run for president once and he’ll almost certainly do it again, so it’s South Bend and beyond on this episode of...

In 2020, Andrew Yang ran for president, and although he never really had a serious chance, he became a familiar name, and a familiar face. In 2021, he’s running for Mayor of New York City, and this time, he might win. If he does, Yang will face an enormous challenge: navigating one of the world’s most important cities through an uncertain recovery. A man with essentially no political experience but a lot of ideas and a lot of charisma, Yang has the opportunity to reimagine how the...

Unless you’re lucky enough to live on another planet, you’ve probably heard about the climate crisis. It’s a problem we must address if we want humanity--and the rest of the Earth’s animal and plant population--to continue to survive and thrive. But in order for that surviving and thriving to happen, we must immediately and definitively cut emissions and begin the transition away from fossil fuels. How’s that going? As you’ve probably heard, not so well, and as a result, more radical...

Americans aren’t in agreement about much these days, but there does appear to be one thing that they overwhelmingly support: legalizing the medical and recreational use of cannabis. Across the country, cannabis is winning at the ballot box and in the statehouse, and whether you partake or not, legalization has major implications for civil rights and civil liberties, for social and racial justice, and, of course, for those who see cannabis as an enormous opportunity to make a lot of money....

In 1851, then Secretary of the Interior Alexander H.H. Stuart wrote the following: “What is to become of the aboriginal race? … A temporary system can no longer be pursued. The policy of removal, except under peculiar circumstances, must necessarily be abandoned; and the only alternatives left are, to civilize or exterminate them.” In 2021, Congresswoman Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo woman, was confirmed Secretary of the Interior. Haaland, a single mother who enrolled in college at 28 and...

Does the nuclear command authority of the United States protect the world from an ill-considered strike by the Commander in Chief? Short answer: No. Before 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, many people may have thought that existential risk was the stuff of science fiction. Not anymore. Joan Rohlfing has been working on managing existential risk for decades. From arms control to disarmament, she has had a hand in almost every conceivable aspect of the nuclear portfolio. And while an intentional...

In 2012, hundreds of fast-food workers in New York City walked off the job to demand higher wages and the right to unionize, in what would mark the beginning of the “Fight for $15.” In 2021, raising the minimum wage to $15-an-hour nearly made it into the American Rescue Plan, the enormous COVID-19 relief package which President Biden signed in March. And from fast-food workers to home care workers and beyond, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is engaged in the fights that may...

Do you eat food? If you answered yes, you are impacted by the United States Department of Agriculture, and the person who is currently in charge of it: former Governor of Iowa Tom Vilsack. And it’s not just food: from environmental justice, to economic justice, to racial justice, to climate justice, agriculture sits at the nexus of many of the critical issues of our time. Basically, power isn’t always where you think it is, and the Secretary of Agriculture is probably the most powerful...

Politicians have been trying to “fix” health care in the United States for nearly a century, and they really never manage to do it. Why? It has everything to do with money, and the moneyed interests--from health insurers to hospitals to pharmaceuticals--which have basically built the system we have today, and which spend more on lobbying to keep it that way than the military-industrial complex spends on defense. The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a group led by Hillary for...

In 2020, Arizona and Georgia, two traditionally red states, turned blue. And while Stacey Abrams has received a lot of credit and media attention for the organizing that led to Georgia turning blue, what happened in Arizona? Is there a Stacey Abrams of Arizona? To find out, Sean Morrow spoke with some of the observers who saw it coming and one of the organizers who made it happen, and discovered that Arizona turning blue is about communities organizing around civil rights, about demographic...

One of the defining characteristics of the modern nation state is that the state has a monopoly on the use of force. In the United States, police officers are a manifestation of this agreement, to which we are all parties--whether we like it or not--and that is perhaps one reason among many why the apparent lack of accountability that seemingly pervades incidents of police misconduct is so troubling: it throws into question the terms of the social contract. There’s a lot to talk about here,...

On April 19th, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; 168 people were killed, and hundreds more injured, in what remains the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in the United States. Twenty five years later, in 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that the United States had recorded the deadliest year for domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City Bombing. Then came the January 6th Insurrection. America has...

Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is one of the most powerful and one of the most enigmatic people in the world. Often positioned as a primary global antagonist of the United States, Khamenei and his regime have endured five American presidents, and his story reveals, among other things, the consequences of American foreign policy. But Khamenei himself is a clever politician, a leader who has maintained the pious economic populism of the Iranian...

Ronald Reagan, a man who was first elected President more than forty years ago, remains one of the most impactful and influential conservative politicians in American history. Reagan, who made it in Hollywood before he made it to the White House, was a towering statesman, a favorite of Republicans and Democrats alike, and a man whose image recalls a past which may never have existed in the first place. How we view Reagan is one way in which America reveals itself, and more importantly, what...

"Who Is?," an original podcast from NowThis News that explores the lives of the powerful, is back for a third season. On "Who Is?," host and NowThis correspondent Sean Morrow dives deep into the stories and backstories of the politicians, donors, media moguls, movements, and ideas that shape our lives, from Ronald Reagan to Inherited Wealth, and Domestic Violent Extremism to Police Unions. Featuring conversations with the reporters, biographers, colleagues, confidantes--and occasionally...

“Nobody would be fighting this hard to suppress the vote—the lie about voter fraud—if the vote was not powerful.” - Reverend Doctor William Barber II Bonus episode! If you listened to “Who Is Electoral College,” you heard from Reverend Doctor William Barber II. Reverend Doctor Barber is a major civil rights leader, organizer, and also a certified genius: he got the MacArthur grant in 2018, which is unofficially called the 'Genius Grant.' Rev. Barber is the founder of Repairers of the...

In 2000 and 2016, the candidate who lost the popular vote was elected president. Somehow, that’s democracy at work, and it’s thanks to a baroque institution called the Electoral College. Born out of the same contentious negotiations in 1787 that gave America the Three-fifths Compromise and the structure of the Senate, which bestows equal representation on Wyoming (the least populated state) and California (the most), the Electoral College remains with us today despite numerous attempts to...

After a lifetime of firsts--from San Francisco District Attorney to California Attorney General to the Senate--Kamala Harris could become the first woman to serve as Vice President. Born in Oakland, California, and raised in Berkeley, Harris’s groundbreaking career in law enforcement has opened up space for women like Chicago’s Kimberly M. Foxx and Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby. But it has also on occasion put her at odds with the communities she is first to represent in office, and at times...

What do John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh have in common? They made it onto the Supreme Court of the United States in part as a result of the activity of Leonard Leo, the de facto head of the conservative legal movement. Leo, who until recently led the Federalist Society, is a masterful conductor of a network of nonprofits and advocacy groups that have largely succeeded in transforming the third branch of American government, the Judicial. If Amy Coney Barrett, a...

Andrew Wheeler, the current Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is the most important member of the Trump Administration that you’ve never heard of. Extremely effective, Wheeler has systematically rolled back landmark federal regulation designed to address the climate crisis, and meticulously dismantled longstanding rules that protect our air, water, and environment. On this episode of "Who Is?," Sean Morrow dives deep into Wheeler’s roots in West Virginia, a state which...

It’s one thing to believe that a powerful elite exerts an outsize influence on American democracy. But it’s another thing to believe that this elite is involved in an organized conspiracy of Satanic worship and pedophilia, and further, that the only person who can save the children--and America--is President Donald J. Trump. This is the general thesis of QAnon, a bizarre and baseless ideology that has been embraced by as many as several million Americans, who organize primarily on social...

Russian President Vladimir Putin is one of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet. And yet, much of his story remains a mystery. Born in St. Petersburg, when it was still known as Leningrad, Putin’s childhood unfolded on the streets of a city  recovering from a devastating, years-long siege during World War II. Today, Putin is the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin, and could be in charge until 2036. On this episode of Who Is?, Sean Morrow dives deep into Putin’s past,...