Live at Truthdig: The Future of the Progressive Movement and Confronting Police Brutality

A protester at one of Hillary Clinton’s events earlier this year. (Screen shot via YouTube)

On Tuesday morning, Bernie Sanders officially endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, disappointing many of his supporters and inspiring optimism in Democratic Party leaders. And over the past week, a stunned nation dealt with the aftermath of the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, as well as the deaths of four police officers in Dallas.

At 1 p.m. PDT Thursday, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer and his team sat down with special guest Melina Abdullah. Abdullah, a professor and chair of pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, is at the forefront of Los Angeles’ Black Lives Matter movement. She joins the Truthdig team to discuss the implications of last week’s news. What’s next for the progressive movement that emerged with Sanders as its champion? How do we combat police brutality and racial injustice? And how will these important progressive issues continue to be addressed in American politics?

You can watch the full discussion below:

For more background on Melina Abdullah, check out the video below, taken from the Politicon 2016 panel “#BlackLivesMatter: Political Prisoners vs. Police Impunity.” Abdullah discusses the systemic problems inherent in policing and discuss what BLM is doing to combat it:

Scheer, in a column published Tuesday, had this to say of Sanders’ endorsement:

The progressive protest he led was not much of a political revolution if he believes the Democratic leadership that has held power for two-thirds of the past 24 years could now so easily accommodate it. What he has bought into is that the revolt on the Republican side is so irrationally hardcore that Hillary Clinton is now our only bulwark against an imminent variant of American fascist rule.

That is the argument that now captivates the mass media, along with the rest of the establishment, and because Trump plays the devil part so well, many voters will feel they have no choice but to heed Bernie’s siren song.

Check out past editions of Live at Truthdig on our YouTube channel.