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What a Tipping Point Looks Like

Is this what we have to look forward to?

Words: Laicie Heeley
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  • This season on Things That Go Boom, we’re starting in Canada, because four years after January 6th, we want — we need — to understand our own divide. In 1970, Canada’s streets were full of troops and the country was on edge. Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte had been captured by a militant French separatist[...]
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In 1970, Canada’s streets were full of troops and the country was on edge. Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte had been captured by a militant French separatist group, the FLQ, and the Canadian government worried thousands of FLQ sympathizers could be ready to unleash chaos in Quebec. As it turned out, the group that caused so much fear throughout the 1960s was never more than a few dozen individuals. 

This season on Things That Go Boom, we’re starting in Canada, because four years after Jan. 6, the US is as divided as ever. And we wondered if it might be headed for an October Crisis of its own.

It doesn’t take a lot of people to create a lot of fear. But what does it mean for a place to devolve into the grip of that fear, and how do we escape it?

GUESTS

Jean Foster, retired schoolteacher; Elizabeth Morgan, philanthropist and organic farmer; Chris Oliveros, graphic novelist, “Are You Willing To Die For The Cause”; Alexandre Turgeon, historian, Laval University; Peter Graefe, political scientist, McGill University

RESOURCES

You can buy Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? by Chris Oliveros here.

Laicie Heeley

Editor in Chief

Laicie Heeley is the founding CEO of Inkstick Media, where she serves as Editor in Chief of the foreign policy magazine Inkstick and Executive Producer and Host of the PRX- and Inkstick-produced podcast, Things That Go Boom. Heeley’s reporting has appeared on public radio stations across America and the BBC, where she’s explored global security issues including domestic terrorism, disinformation, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Prior to launching Inkstick, Heeley was a Fellow with the Stimson Center’s Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense program and Policy Director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Her publications include work on sanctions, diplomacy, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, along with the first full accounting of US counterterrorism spending after 9/11.

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  • When Members of Congress are sworn into office, they say an oath.  To protect the country from all enemies… foreign and domestic.  But what does a domestic enemy look like? And how can they be stopped?  Four years after January 6th,  we're turning our eyes on the US to ask, “in our divided times, how[...]
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  • When former US Navy Intelligence Officer Andrew McCormick spent the holiday season in Kandahar in 2013, attempts at holiday cheer were everywhere. But few were more out-of-touch than the generic care packages sent from civilians who knew nothing about him — or the war he was fighting.  Part of our series of monologues in partnership[...]
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  • One night In 1968, Ed Meagher was finishing his last shift at Clark Airways, which included authenticating and repeating messages for the nuclear-armed B-52 fleet in Southeast Asia.  Then his phone lines started dinging, with signal after signal — and he couldn’t figure out why none were a match.  This monologue is the second in[...]
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