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If we want to understand how we arrived in this authoritarian moment in 2025, we need to understand one of the central pathways that brought us here: McCarthyism.

For refusing to sign a loyalty oath she was barred from practicing law, targeted by the FBI. Founder of Berkeley’s Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, pioneered the field of “peace law,”wrote the resolution establishing Berkeley-a Human Rights City

The impact can linger not just for years but decades.

‘False Witness’ (1955), East St. Louis Desegregates (1950), A New Deal Triumph (1940), Greensboro Students Lead the Way (1960), Sled Dogs and Mushers to the Rescue (1925), Apartheid’s Swan Song (1990)

A hundred years ago, radical Finnish immigrants founded a cooperatively-owned park to escape political repression on Minnesota’s Iron Range. It’s still “a workingman’s paradise.”