This season of America continues to get more and more violent. Last Thursday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the administration would livestream a public firing squad execution. That same day in New York City, an ICE agent shot immigrant Oscar Bergal in the neck while he was driving a car with his five-year-old son in the backseat. “We're moving the bar on what is socially acceptable,” says Daniel Peña, the latest member of the Clock It groupchat. Symone and Eugene invited the Pushcart Prize-winning writer & Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar to discuss his new book “How to Look Away,” America’s evolving relationship with violence, how hit TV shows from the 2010s predicted Donald Trump’s rise and the use of force for political gain. “ For people who were like, it was outside the realm of their imaginations that Trump could happen, you saw pretty quickly like, no, this is in the DNA of the country right now,” he says.

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Michael Steele remains a Republican, but the party as it stands today is unrecognizable to him. “For the sake of power, we bought the idea of the South will rise again,” he says. “We should've killed it in its infancy and [been] done with it because it gave rise to what happened on January 6th.” The first Black chairman of GOPAC and the RNC joins the groupchat to offer his take on big money (and dark money) in politics, to reflect on how his faith guides his politics, and to explain why he’s stuck with the Republicans in spite of their about-face with regard to individual liberties. “ The easiest thing to do is walk away,” says Steele. “ I have to believe in your rights as a citizen under the flag and the Constitution to be on this soil, to live on this soil, to flourish on this soil – however we find you on this soil.”

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We're a month out from the most consequential midterm elections of the 21st century. With momentum on its side, the Democratic party is hoping that big wins in November will lead to a dredging of the entire federal government – one that's continued an ICE surge with impunity, that's failed to stem a worsening affordability crisis, and that's started wars after promising to end them. As the countdown to the elections winds down, Symone and Eugene invite the one-and-only Rachel Maddow back into the groupchat to share their hope that the Democratic party will rise to the occasion and start cleaning up the political mess we’re in. They also get into how her new true crime documentary – Kill, Bury, Print – reflects local communities fighting back against corrupt forces in government. "This is not a smoke detector moment. This is a flames in the kitchen moment," says Rachel, who has not given up. "Even their own people are repulsed by the worst things they're doing. And that to me is a healthy sign."

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