Amy Spitalnick is the Executive Director of Integrity First for America. Along with her colleagues, the noted lawyers Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn, she has been spearheading another lawsuit against some of the same militia groups who invaded Charlottesville, but this time it’s for monetary damages on behalf of plaintiffs who were badly injured and it's based on a set of laws that were passed to deal with the KU Klux Klan’s reign of terror. The interview explores a groundbreaking attempt to use the rule of law to stop extremism in its tracks and to force these violent forces to be held to account for their acts in a public court of law.
Overcoming extremism is going to require leadership from not only the public sector but from the private sector as well, and especially from tech companies. Ifeoma Ozoma is the public policy and social impact manager at Pinterest, the very popular internet platform. Pinterest has decided to do everything they can to make their platform safe for all their users. Safe from hate, safe from dangerous medical misinformation and safe from extremism. In the process, Ifeoma herself has been targeted by extremists. But that hasn’t stopped her work, or Pinterest’s. As you’ll hear, this company’s work against extremism doesn’t just happen on its own. It takes protocols, teams, follow through, and help from users.
In this episode, we turn to another set of democratic institutions: faith-based organizations and alliances. Alvin Edwards is not only a former mayor of Charlottesville; he is the pastor of Charlottesville’s largest African American church and he founded the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, which includes Charlottesville synagogue, Catholic church, and mosque. As you’ll hear him describe, the collective played a significant role in designing the community response to the alt-right invasions of 2017 and afterward. Sarah Ruger runs Free Expression programs at the Charles Koch Institute. It has been surprising to some that this podcast includes a partnership between organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, the Ford Foundation and conservative organizations like the Charles Koch Institute. She speaks about the power of alliances in working against extremism, and what brought the libertarian Koch Institute to this cause.
Samar Ali is a Muslim-American attorney who grew up in Tennessee. She worked as a White House Fellow, where she designed counter-terrorist protocols focused on radicalization. But after she moved back to Tennessee to work for the governor, she became the target of a vicious smear campaign to frame her as a potential terrorist who would impose Sharia law and shut down the Jack Daniels distillery. All of it was obviously false. Instead of becoming a victim, she chose to engage with her attackers. And she saw an opportunity to flip the script. She founded Millions of Conversations, an organization that creates connections between marginalized and mainstream groups, through conversations that stop “othering” and create a more inclusive society.
In 2015, a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, attacked two military recruiting centers in the city, killing five people. The terrorist attack shocked the nation. In 2019, the city’s mayor, Andy Berke, announced a new “Mayor’s Council against Hate” that would include task forces working on action items in seven different specific areas, including the city's public university and the public school, the police department and the business sector. Along the way, the city has innovated in other ways, for instance, in teaching their police to build bridges to marginalized populations who could be radicalized. As a Jewish mayor of a Southern city he has also been the target of vicious attacks, but as you’ll hear in the interview, they have only strengthened his resolve to fight for democratic values.