On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Susan Smith Richardson, the newest CEO of the Center for Public Integrity. Our viewers may remember our last conversation on ‘leaks with integrity’ with predecessor Peter Bale, a former CEO as well. Formerly editorial director of newsroom practice change at Solutions Journalism Network, Susan Smith Richardson has edited leading newspapers from Texas and Chicago to Los Angeles and Sacramento. 

“The Center has a proud legacy of hard-hitting journalism. I plan to build on that legacy, focusing on making our work more accessible and more relevant to communities across the country,” Richardson said in the announcement of her appointment. She continued, “At a time of disinformation and disaffection with institutions we have to rethink what issues we cover, how we cover them, and whose stories define what is newsworthy, if we are truly to hold power to account.” 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Frank Bowman III, professor of law at the University of Missouri and visiting professor at Georgetown Law. A constitutional scholar, his new book is “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump,” and it's a Cambridge University Press title. 

I wanted to get right to it. We're recording in the heat of summer. Impeachment is at a lull, but we have a lot to discuss. 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Ed Lopez-Reyes to continue our discussion of the national popular vote movement with one of its most important grassroots advocates on the eastern seaboard. 

A Connecticut-based Republican strategist Lopez is chief consultant of Wolf and King Strategies and served on the Joint Intelligence Operations Center Europe Analytics Center in imagery and counterterrorism from 2002 through 2010. He also served on Utah Governor Jon Huntsman's 2012 New Hampshire presidential primary campaign steering committee and was National Cochairman of Republicans for Johnson-Weld in 2016. A member of the National Guard in Connecticut, Lopez also returned from a month long training in Louisiana. 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Steven Knott, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Knott, co-chair, the presidential oral history program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at U. Va.

Today, we consider the historical and contemporary character of the nation. “The Lost Soul of the American Presidency” is the forthcoming University Press of Kansas book from my next guest. He argues that the American presidency has devolved from the neutral unifying office envisioned by the framers of the constitution into the demagogic partisan entity of the present. 

His newest book, as I note is “The Lost Soul of the American Presidency” will be published this November. 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Dr. Jonathan Metzl, professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University where he also directs the Center for Medicine, Health and Society. He is research director of the Safe Tennessee Project, a nonpartisan volunteer-based organization that's concerned with gun-related injuries and fatalities in America and in Tennessee. 

In his new Basic Books, title “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland” my guest reveals how the backlash policies against a multicultural liberal America have mortal consequences even for the people they promise to help. 

“Dying of Whiteness” says one of my favorite open mind guests Thomas Frank “is a diagnosis for America. It's not reassuring. Failing health, failing graduation rates, guns everywhere, our fantasies are driving us to an early grave and Metzl is lucid and careful and mercifully clinical in telling us exactly how this public health disaster came to be. Read it today. There is still time before the autopsy.” 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome two leading organizers in the movement to rebuild and preserve American democracy.  Ethan Todras-Whitehill is the cofounder and executive director of Swing Left. Prior to the election of Trump, he was a writer, journalist, and teacher. After the 2016 election, he decided to step off the sidelines and become more politically active. He started Swing Left to make it easier for others to do the same. Last year, Swing Left successfully mobilized a grassroots army to take back the House. 

Catherine Vaughan is the chief strategy officer of Swing Left. She was previously the CEO and cofounder of Flippable, an organization to support candidates running for state office. Flippable supported 80 percent of all flips accomplished in their target chambers in 2018 and directed 91 percent of funds toward races decided by less than 10 points. This year Swing Left recently unveiled it's Super State Strategy for 2020 designed to organize progressive victories across the White House, the US Senate and state houses by focusing on 11 so-called Super States, volunteers and donors can multiply their impact up and down the ballot. And I might add that now Flippable is a part of Swing Left. You guys are working together towards those collective goals.