This episode first aired in 2023, focusing on the strategies to motivate young voters and we’re sharing it again in the wake of the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. Kirk, a renowned conservative youth organizer, was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University. Nothing divides Americans like politics — but young voters continue to matter. Host Trey Kay talks with journalist Kyle Spencer, whose book Raising Them Right traces how conservative organizers spent years building a youth movement on campuses. Spencer says the growth was strategic and well funded. Money can organize power, she notes, though it doesn’t force a single, uniform ideology on young people. Kay also talks with Abby Kiesa of Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), who explains how youth participation has shifted in the Trump era and why a deeper problem persists: the political system still struggles to turn young people’s political interest into sustained turnout. Revisiting this Us & Them episode in the wake of Kirk’s death offers context for how campus-based organizing — and reactions to it — have shaped youth politics today.

As the United States prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, attention is focused on the relevance of the American Revolution to our country today. The new episode of Us & Them spotlights a recent community event at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, W.Va with host Trey Kay and three top historians to talk about the realities of our revolutionary past. Ken Burns’ upcoming PBS series The American Revolution shines a light on the war that transformed 13 colonies into a nation. This timely episode of Us & Them revisits America’s origin story with fresh eyes, probing what we remember, what we forget, and why it matters now.

Just as America faces some of its most critical political divides, our criminal justice system suffers from a lack of public trust. How are these dual crises interwoven? In this episode of Us & Them, host Trey Kay talks with legal scholar David Sklansky, a Stanford professor who co-directs the school’s Criminal Justice Center. In his new book “Criminal Justice in Divided America,” Sklansky says reforming the nation’s justice system may be at the core of recovering our democracy. In fact, he says there are clear approaches and solutions to help reform what’s broken and that even the basic concept of the jury trial can re-educate us in the skills and habits required to work across differences in a pluralistic democracy. In the end, Sklansky says the criminal justice system is one of the few places where Americans of varying beliefs and persuasions engage with each other to make important decisions.