Civil liberties are the fundamental rights and freedoms that protect individuals from government overreach and guarantee space for personal autonomy, expression, and belief. They include freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to privacy and due process; and protection from discrimination and unjust treatment. Civil liberties are what allow citizens to challenge authority, dissent without fear, and live according to their own values while still participating in a shared civic life.
These freedoms are essential to democracy because they set the boundaries of government power and uphold the dignity of individuals. When civil liberties are respected, they create the conditions for open debate, innovation, and accountability. When they are restricted—whether through censorship, surveillance, discrimination, or authoritarian policies—democracy weakens, and citizens lose both their voice and their protection.
This collection of podcast episodes examines civil liberties from multiple angles: the role of the First Amendment and the press in a free society, debates over religion and state, battles for gender and reproductive equality, and the threats posed by authoritarianism and extremist movements. You’ll hear from legal scholars, activists, journalists, and advocates who explore how civil liberties are defended, challenged, and redefined in a changing world. Together, these conversations highlight why protecting civil liberties is not just about individual rights—it’s about preserving the very foundation of democracy itself.
In this week’s episode of Politics In Question, Nicholas Davis joins Julia and Lee to discuss how Americans define democracy. Davis is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. His research focuses on political psychology, public opinion, ideology, and how Americans understand democratic values more broadly. He is the co-author of Democracy’s Meanings: How the Public Understands Democracy and Why It Matters (the University of Michigan Press).
How have Americans defined democracy differently over time? What are its essential characteristics? Do Americans view democracy in procedural terms? Is its primary function the protection of civil liberties? Or do Americans understand democracy in social terms? Do they believe it is central to helping people meet their material needs? And what about the people who hold views between these two poles? These are some of the questions Nicholas, Julia, and Lee ask in this week’s episode.
Listen to the full episode on Politics in Question: How Do Americans Actually Define Democracy?
David McCraw is the Deputy General Counsel of the New York Times and author of Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts.
The First Amendment and a strong Fourth Estate are essential to a healthy democracy. McCraw spends his days making sure that journalists can do their work in the United States and around the world. This includes responding to libel suits and legal threats, reviewing stories that are likely to be the subject of a lawsuit, helping reporters who run into trouble abroad, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and much more.
Listen to the full episode on Democracy Works: Defending the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate
By any measure this has been a momentous week for global politics. President Biden’s surprise trip to Kyiv, his “freedom” speech in Warsaw, the visit of China’s top diplomat to Moscow, and Vladimir Putin’s decision to suspend Russian participation in the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with the U.S. are all signs of deepening big-power tensions.
This coincides with the first anniversary of the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War Two. In the early hours of February 24 last year, Putin’s tanks rolled across Ukraine’s borders.
Our podcast guest is well-known human rights advocate, Jacob Mchangama, CEO of the Danish think tank Justitia, and author of the recent book, “Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media”. We discuss the Ukraine war's broader implications for fundamental values that are a vital part of the growing struggle between the West autocratic powers.
One of the biggest surprises of the past year has been the strength of European and American support for President Zelenskyy and Ukraine.
“I’m very heartened by it,” says Mchangama. “It’s a good antidote to a decay of the West and complacency of democracies narrative that has been driving some of the authoritarian backlash.”
“Even a year in, there still seems to be solid support in many countries for the Ukrainian cause and for continuing to supply them with the means to defend themselves and hopefully decisively turn the tide.”
Today, it could well be argued that Joe Biden is the first cold war President since Ronald Reagan. In this episode, we learn why free speech is so vital to oppressed groups and racial minorities. We examine the recent "free speech recession", and how to ensure that young people are better equipped to deal with misinformation on social media and the internet.
Listen to the full episode on How Do We Fix It?: Ukraine and the Wider Conflict. Values at Stake: Jacob Mchangama
Mike talks with Greg Lukianoff, attorney, New York Times best-selling author, and President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He’s the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom From Speech, and FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Most recently, he co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure with Jonathan Haidt.
Mike and Greg discuss
– the 3 Great Untruths of modern American society
– fragile kids
– tribalism and ‘us vs. them’ thinking
– white male privilege
– Stoicism, Buddhism, and modern psychology
– and lots more
Listen to the full episode on The Politics Guys: Greg Lukianoff on Free Speech on Campus
In this timely episode of "Talkin' Politics & Religion Without Killin' Each Other," host Corey Nathan speaks with Professor Daniel Mach, Director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief and adjunct professor of law at the George Washington University Law School. They explore the complexities of First Amendment rights, the historical Scopes Trial, and the fine line between religious freedom and government endorsement of religion.
What We Discuss:
Episode Highlights:
Listen to the full episode on Talkin‘ Politics & Religion Without Killin‘ Each Other: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight for the 1st Amendment
As we barrel toward America’s 250th, one could argue that if we crack up before we get there (some bad days we’d take even odds), it’ll have something to do with the complexity of being in charge of executing one of the founders’ biggest ideas — that the church and the state were to be separate in this new nation of theirs. (It had been so much “easier” when the king told all us peasants what religion we were.)
Our framers, for the first time in history, asserted that a citizenry had “natural rights” as human beings, given to them only by God, to follow (and be responsible for) our individual consciences — including the right to not believe at all. These rights could then not be taken by the government. Those dudes in tights, both Christian and Deist, had birthed a country where all sorts of religious belief would thrive.
Turns out high principles about freedom for everyone all at the same time wouldn’t be a piece of cake and after 250-ish years of disagreement, we’re still haggling over those darn specifics — partly because we’re masters of not seeing the log in our own eyes. God Squad goes right to the real conversation on this age-old prickly topic.
Listen to the full episode on Village Squarecast: Church v. State
In the early 1900s, birth records of children given up for adoption were sealed and confidential, an effort to shield mothers and children from the societal shame of being born out of wedlock. Fast forward to the advent of the Internet, and adopted adults used the power of the web to form online networks connecting the community, and as helpful as these support groups were, adoptees still lacked the legal protections to access their birth records.
Groups like Bastard Nation helped its members navigate access to birth records, as well as fight the stigma of adoption altogether. It was out of this radical group that the very intimate issue of adoption made its way to the ballot box, begging the question, what are the limits of making the personal, political? This episode explains how this initiative addressed the social stigma around adoption and addresses the longstanding debates around the power of ballot initiatives.
Listen to the full episode on When the People Decide: Bastard Nation Finds Its Voice
Carol Jenkins is the President and CEO of the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality, sister organizations dedicated to the adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment. We discuss the current state of the ERA and why this constitutional amendment will address the problems of equality, misogyny, and discrimination.
The Equal Rights Amendment guarantees equality of rights under the law, regardless of sex. The source of sexism, however, derives directly from the Constitution, which created a gold standard of living that really only applied to white men. That playbook is faulty, and the ERA provides a way to fix it. Despite already gaining the ratification of 38 states, the ERA has not yet been formally published as the 28th amendment. The battle over ratification has lasted for nearly a century.
Listen to the full episode on Future Hindsight: Equal Rights Amendment: Carol Jenkins
Phil Aroneanu joins The Great Battlefield podcast to talk about his career in progressive politics from co-founding 350.org, an organization working to fight climate change to what he was doing recently at The ACLU.
Listen to the full episode on The Great Battlefield: Fighting The Climate Crisis and Digital Activism for Civil Liberties
In the end, the worst of everyone’s election fears — political violence, overt foreign interference or a razor-thin margin between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump leading to a hotly contested legal battle — did not come to pass. Instead, Donald Trump won a plurality of votes for president, and did so decisively. On January 20, 2025, he will once again become the country’s most powerful executive.
His victory raises weighty questions for the experts at Campaign Legal Center. Trump ran explicitly on a platform of behaving like an authoritarian, promising to fire U.S. civil servants, threatening opponents with jail, and brandishing military force against would-be dissenters. As his return to power approaches, we grapple with a paradoxical election, in which voters declared their preference for the candidate who repeatedly threatened the American system as we know it.
Joining Simone in this episode are Trevor Potter, CLC’s president and founder, and CLC senior vice presidents Paul M. Smith and Bruce Spiva. They offer their forecasts for the uncertain years ahead and explain what this election did (and did not) signify about the health of American democracy.
Listen to the full episode on Democracy Decoded: A Postelection Fight for Democracy
For the past few episodes, Maren has explored the reality of immigration detention, uplifting the conditions in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) centers where thousands are held under the presumption that they may be threats to national security. In the season finale of Bad Watchdog, we return to where we started, with the DHS’s counterterrorism mission. Maren breaks down the current landscape of terrorism in the United States, where the most dangerous threat isn’t posed by those who’ve crossed our borders illegally, but by homegrown, far-right, violent extremists. And, as Maren learns, domestic violent extremism isn’t just a problem across the country — it’s a problem in DHS’s own ranks as well.
Domestic terrorism experts Daryl Johnson and Alejandro Buetel walk Maren through the rise of far-right violent extremism in the U.S. and interrogate whether DHS is taking the threat seriously. Maren discusses both shortfalls and potential solutions for how DHS could address far-right violent extremism with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty’s Spencer Reynolds. POGO Senior Investigator Nick Schwellenbach shares his investigation into just how many Oath Keepers are or were employed at DHS. And Maren connects with people who are working to make this broken system more humane, including activists Arely Westley and Berto Hernandez, Las Americas Director of Cross-Border Strategies Crystal Sandoval, former POGO Senior Researcher Freddy Martinez, and POGO Senior Paralegal Lance Sims.
Listen to the full episode on Bad WatchDog: The Real Threat
The authoritarian movements across the world share underlying discriminatory ideologies, and too often have been exported from the U.S. The consequence of the growth in these movements is violence and the dangerous integration of bigoted and racist ideas into societal discourse, government policies, and political platforms. Increasingly, as far-right extremist movements have gained in strength, established taboos around far-right extremism have collapsed as mainstream political parties cooperate with extremists once considered out of bounds.
This week we look at how Project 2025’s influence and agenda is playing out across the MAGA-captured United States, as well as Project 2025’s massive assault on civil liberties across America.
Listen to the full episode on Freedom Over Fascism: Christian Nationalism, Violence, and the Right with Dr. Heidi Beirich, Co-Founder Global Project Against Hate and Extremism
Steven Levitsky, a leading expert on authoritarian regimes, joins host Alex Lovit to talk about the US’s current slide into authoritarianism and what we can do about it.
Democracies tolerate dissent. In a democracy, citizens and institutions can criticize, protest, or file legal claims against the government, without fear of reprisal. That is no longer true of the US today, which means that the US is no longer a full democracy.
Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and professor of government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Along with many acclaimed academic works, he is the coauthor (with Daniel Ziblatt) of two bestselling books about threats to democracy: 2018’s How Democracies Die and 2023’s Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He is also a senior fellow at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.
Listen to the full episode on The Context: Authoritarianism Isn’t Coming. It’s Here.
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