This week, we look at the inaugural class of Gen Z congressional candidates. Plus, how the strategy of prominent election denialists has changed and the story of one Gazan’s quest for heart surgery.
Europeans, including our French family, admire America for coming to their rescue during two world wars on their soil. They know American political campaigns can get ugly. But when ballots are counted, power has passed peacefully ever since the Civil War.
Yet 18 months after the 2020 election that Joe Biden won with 306 electoral votes, millions of Americans still choose to believe the lie that Donald Trump won.
Meanwhile, other countries around the world, including France, Australia and Colombia, which has been roiled by an armed insurrection for decades, held contentious political campaigns. But the losers accepted the results. Democracy moved on.
At the same time, we saw Jan. 6 committee witnesses — conscientious public servants, and overwhelmingly Republican — detail how Donald Trump tried to bully them into changing honest vote totals. Cassidy Hutchinson recounted how the president she faithfully served had cheered for a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol, hang the vice president and overturn election results. It was almost enough to make us hurl our plates at the wall.
And of course, it seemed not a week went by without a mass shooting somewhere in America. I was flying back when we saw alerts from Highland Park, Ill., where seven people were killed in a shooting at a July Fourth parade. Roughly 45,000 people were shot to death in the U.S. last year alone in the U.S.
At a time when U.S. leadership is called for, from Ukraine to the environment, our American family had to wonder: What kind of example are we to the world right now?
Scott Simon is one of NPR's most renowned news anchors. He is the host of Weekend Edition Saturday and one of the hosts of the morning news podcast Up First. Be sure to listen to him every Saturday on your local NPR station, and follow him on Twitter.
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The first Gen Z political candidates are running for Congress. These aspiring lawmakers — who are eligible to serve at 25 — say they’ve been shaped by economic, social and political upheaval. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a candidate in Florida’s 10th Congressional District, points to one defining childhood moment: “Turning on the TV and seeing a bunch of people sleeping outside of Wall Street talking about something called ‘wealth inequality.’” How will the volatility impact Gen Z’s politics? What does it take for a 70-year-old man in Gaza to get a lifesaving open heart surgery? We shadowed a man for months as his family begged for permission to leave Gaza for a surgery available in hospitals just a short drive away. Yousef Al-Kurd is one of the many Gazans who have faced tortuous quests to receieve medical treatments. This is his harrowing story.
Election deniers have held hundreds of grassroots events to fuel the lie that Donald Trump won. The strategy among election conspiracy theorists has noticeably changed as allies of Trump furiously travel across the country, spreading fraud misinformation in nearly every state. These are the four key figures behind the movement.
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