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Jessica Sewing and Tori Wade discuss the Kansas City Social Media Club. Jessica is their president. Tori is an influencer. They describe what they do. The club includes members who will officially receive "Hashie awards", which originated with the original Social Media Club. Next spring, official awards will be presented here in Kansas City.  Whether you are a marketing professional, a journalist, a researcher, or an activist with some civil society organization, the Kansas City Social Media Club wants to help you be more effective in disseminating your message as long as it's ethical. No entrepreneurs of hate need apply.  Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen said, "[T]he shortest path to a click is anger or hate."1 In 2014 Renée DiResta documented how for-profit social media companies and influencers made money by promoting lies about the safety of vaccines, leading to outbreaks of diseases that have been preventable for over half a century. She was then invited to found the Stanford Internet Observatory, whose work included documenting fraudulent attacks on election integrity throughout the 2020 US presidential election cycle. So when Trump lost, he had an army already primed to believe that the election had been stolen from him. Many were  eager to respond to his call to "Stop the Steal" by attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  DiResta's documentation of those lies led to death threats, frivolous lawsuits, congressional subpoenas and legal bills over $7 million. She recommends that researchers and honest journalists improve their use of social media, so they can more effectively counter the lies that are threatening democracy and broadly shared peace and prosperity.2 Social media clubs want to help.  _______ "Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen says" on Wikiversity (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Facebook_whistleblower_Frances_Haugen_says). "Managing the good and the evils of social media" on Wikiversity (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Managing_the_good_and_the_evils_of_social_media). Copyright 2026 Jessica Sewing and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Do you believe that the current Administration is doing what's best for you and the rest of the US? Or are many of their actions illegal and creating major problems for the bottom 99 percent of the US to please the ultra wealthy?  Whatever you believe, members of local Leagues of Women Voters want to assure you of the integrity of election procedures, including the equipment they use, particularly since none of it is connected to the Internet. Recent visits by members of the Leagues of Women Voters of Johnson County, Kansas, and of Kansas City - Jackson, Clay, and Platte Counties, Missouri, found no issues. What they have seen contradicts the claims about election integrity. In their experience, the vast majority of election officials are honest US citizens more concerned that all votes be counted fairly than that a particular party or candidate wins.  A more credible explanation for the widespread concern with electoral integrity in the US is that so many of us live in media silos governed by algorithms, often promoting "entrepreneurs of hate"1 to please people, especially major corporations, that control most of the money for the media. Entrepreneurs of hate include social media influencers, who make money spreading lies about electoral integrity. A leading expert on social media influencers is Renée DiResta. Around 2014-2015 she documented how lies about the dangers of vaccines were spread by social media and influencers. That work led to her being asked to found the Stanford Internet Observatory. Their work through the 2020 presidential election cycle documented how social media influencers were making money spreading lies about the integrity of election procedures. After the 2020 election results were announced, a small army of Americans were eager to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And DiResta was hit with frivolous lawsuits hoping to bankrupt her to stop her from disseminating her documentation of the lies. Focusing on the 2020 election results, she received congressional subpoenas claiming that she had passed orders from the "Deep State" to social media platforms like Facebook demanding that they censor certain speech. Her legal bills ran over $7 million.2 The current campaign questioning the integrity of elections is driven by the 1980 statement of Christian Conservative Paul Weyrich that, "I don't want everybody to vote. ... [O]ur leverage in the elections ... goes up as the voting populace goes down."3 Both the League of Women Voters of Johnson County (Kansas), and of Jackson, Clay, and Platte Counties (Missouri) encourage everyone (who is registered) to vote in this and every election. Strong voter turnout makes our democracy stronger. Copyright 2026 Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license. _______  Joel Mokyr (2017) A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton University Press, p. 60) mentions "entrepreneurs of hate". Mokyr shared the 2025 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics with two others.  See the 2026-08-27 interview with DiResta documented in the Wikiversity article on "Managing the good and the evils of social media" (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Managing_the_good_and_the_evils_of_social_media) and the 2026 update to her book on Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality (PublicAffairs).  "Paul Weyrich" in Wikiquote, accessed 2026-10-18 (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Weyrich).

Chris Mann is the Democratic candidate for Attorney General of Kansas in the general election November 3, running against the incumbent Republican Kris Kobach. He is interviewed by Spencer Graves and Craig Lubow.  Mann started professional life as a police officer. That career ended when he was hit by a drunk driver during a routine traffic stop. After years of physical therapy, he got a law degree from Washburn and joined the Wyandotte County District Attorney’s Office. He has been in private practice since 2016, first providing legal representation to those who could not afford an attorney, then expanding his law practice, primarily representing victims of drunk driving and their families. He got 49.2 percent of the vote against Kris Kobach for Kansas Attorney General in 2022.  Mann said that after law school, "I became a prosecutor handling violent crime cases in Wyandotte County and then moved to the state, where I prosecuted white collar fraudsters and scam artists throughout the state. Now I have my own firm where I represent victims of drunk driving. I've also been the national board chair for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, where I've traveled the country talking to law enforcement and victims, helping to pass laws nationally and here locally that have made our roads a little bit safer. And what I want to do as Attorney General is bring this office back to public service. I want to make sure that this office isn't about Team Red or Team Blue, but about Team Kansas. It's time to take the office away from one man's political agenda and bring it back to the people of Kansas."  Lubow noted that, "In your ad on TV, you mentioned that you were a security prosecutor at one time. What does that mean?" Mann replied, "That means I was taking on scam artists and white collar fraudsters throughout the entire state. In fact, one of the cases I worked was down in Sedgwick County, where I secured a decades long prison sentence against the offender who stole the life savings of a widow down in Sedgwick County. It was a terrible case where all of the money was taken, and this offender had worked to gain trust and then scammed the person out of money. So I did that work across the state, helping to protect victims."  Graves noted that, "Kris Kobach, as Attorney General, has reportedly prosecuted four immigrants for illegal voting.2 Your comment." Mann replied, "This is a guy who in 2016 as part of the National Election Integrity Committee said that there were 3 million illegal votes that occurred in the United States, and he found none there. Just this year he told the people of Kansas that he would be prosecuting thousands of illegal voter cases, and he's prosecuted four. So either Kobach continues to lie to the people of Kansas, or he's really bad at his job."  Graves then asked, "What's your understanding about the integrity of elections in the United States?" Mann replied, "Right here in Kansas what I know is that our elections have been deemed safe and secure for years now. Even our own Republican Secretary of State has said the same that our elections are in fact safe and secure. But we currently have an attorney general who is attacking eligible voters' right to vote in the state of Kansas. Just this year he has attacked mail-in voting, trying to stop that. He has attacked drop boxes. He is trying to make it more difficult for eligible voters to vote. The attorney general's job is actually to make sure that eligible voters' right to vote is protected. That's what I will do when I'm attorney general."1 Graves then asked about the integrity of prosecutions with police officers like Roger Golubsk and prosecutors like Tera Moorhead, who reportedly framed defendants to get convictions. Mann replied, "No one is above the law. We need to hold bad actors accountable wherever they are. My job as attorney general is to make sure that wherever someone is violating the law, we're holding them accountable. For me, it doesn't matter how wealthy or powerful they are. If folks are hurting the people of Kansas, we hold them accountable."    When asked for his top priorities, Mann mentioned the following:   "First supporting law enforcement and prosecutors around the state when they have complex litigation and investigations. I've been traveling the state for the past year. I've been to more than 70 counties now, traveled over 40,000 miles. I've talked to law enforcement in every corner of this state. What I continue to hear is that they're not getting the help they need from the attorney general's office. 70% of law enforcement agencies in the state have 10 or fewer officers, and the majority of those have five or fewer. If they catch a complex investigation or crime, it can take out an entire law enforcement agency. They need the backstop of the attorney general to help them fill that gap and to help them investigate and prosecute those crimes. That's number one."    "Number two is consumer fraud. Just this year, the state is on track for victims to lose nearly $100 million in scams and frauds across the state. As I talk to law enforcement across the state, every city, every agency has a story about a crypto scam or online scam where someone's lost $100 or $100,000. One that I remember specifically is out in western Kansas. I was talking to a farmer out there who had put a down payment on a tractor on an online magazine. It turns out that five other people put a similar down payment down, and there never was a tractor. That farmer tried to call the attorney general's office to get help, but he was told there wasn't any help to have. We need to make sure that the attorney general's office is there for victims  of fraud, making sure that we're able to investigate and prosecute those cases."    "And number three, lastly, the kind of top three things we need to work on: Domestic violence across the state. Lethality in domestic violence is increasing. We lost two police officers in the past year on domestic violence calls, and shelters across the state are overcrowded and underfunded. We have to work with agencies and nonprofits to help bolster that gap. Help make sure the victims, often women and children, have a place to go. They need to be able to escape the violence so it doesn't continue ratcheting up."    "Those are the top three things that I'll do when I get into office."    Lubow asked what the AG's office would do under his direction to investigate and rectify wrongful convictions. Mann replied, "That falls on local district attorneys' offices to handle those cases. We would work with any district attorney's office that's dealing with cases where someone has been wrongfully convicted. No one wants that to occur. We don't want innocent people behind bars, so we would certainly help folks where those cases come up."  Lubow continued, "If a local prosecutor, which has happened in the last couple years, a couple of times in Missouri, if they came to you and said they believe there's a wrongful conviction, and they file something court to get that person released based on the wrongful conviction, would you support that release and not block it, as the attorney general of Missouri has tried to do?" Mann replied, "All of those are on a case-by-case basis. I can't answer in the generic. I'd have to see the facts of any specific case, but certainly no one wants someone who's innocent behind bars."  Lubow then asked, "What position would your office take on the death penalty and the use of it?" Man replied, "The attorney general's job is to follow the law that's on the books, and that law is the death penalty. To the extent that there's a case that comes across my desk, we would pursue the death penalty in that case because it's on the books. I know that there's been a lot of talk in the legislature and in communities, but that is up to our legislature to make that decision on how we proceed in our community. For me, the job of the attorney general isn't to write laws and to push a political agenda. It is to uphold the laws that are in the state of Kansas right now, and it's critical that we do that because we have an attorney general right now that picks and chooses what he wants to support. In fact, just this year, he didn't stand up for the people of Kansas when a law was challenged-a decades-old law that had been in place that didn't fit his political agenda. He chose not to defend the law against the Department of Justice, and that's not the role of the Attorney General."  Graves then asked about optimal response to drunk driving. Mann replied, "This is something obviously I've worked on for a lot of my life. After I was hit by a drunk driver, it took a long time to recover. It was a painful time in my life, but I learned how to turn that pain into purpose. I learned that I could still help victims of crime in the courtroom instead of on the street, which is why I went back to law school. But also at that time, I started working with Mothers Against Drunk Driving and became the National Board Chair. We have worked through a number of programs and technologies that we think can help here in Kansas. One of the laws that I helped pass early on was all offender ignition interlock devices on vehicles of convicted drunk drivers. Since the implementation of that, we've actually seen a significant reduction in DUI fatalities. So that's just one piece. It's going to take far more than that. It's going to take more education. It's going to take more technology. There's some legislation in the federal government right now to equip vehicles with alcohol detection, passive systems, sort of like wearing a seatbelt, but making sure that you're sober to drive the car in a way that we can help folks make the right decision and stay off the road."  Graves continued, "What do you know about alcohol treatment programs or requiring restitution" Mann replied, "We can talk about rehabilitation programs,

Bill Clause and others with Indivisible Kansas City and allies discuss how No Kings 4, Saturday, October 17, 1 PM, at Mill Creek Park, will expand to support Get Out the Vote for November 3. "NoKings.org" invites organizers to "Host an event". If you do, they will invite more than 8 billion humans to your No Kings rally. As this is being written 2026-10-02, six events appear there between Independence, Lee's Summit, Olathe, and Shawnee including one at Mill Creek Park, 1-4 PM.  Copyright 2026 Bill Clause and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Rainey Reitman describes (a) how finance companies punish speech, (b) Freedom of the Press Foundation, and (c) their new Penlight prize. Reitman is a writer, civil liberties advocate, online organizer, and facilitator. She is currently president of the board of Freedom of the Press Foundation, which she co-founded in 2012. At that time she was activism director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Her new book, Transaction Denied: Big Finance's Power to Punish Speech, is a primary topic of this interview. She is interviewed by Spencer Graves. A moderated discussion of the issues raised in this interview is available in the companion “Media literacy and why you should care” article on Wikiversity. Copyright 2026 Rainey Reitman and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

David Graham, Libertarian candidate to represent Kansas in the US Senate, tells Craig Lubow and Spencer Graves why he thinks Kansans should vote for him over incumbent Republican Roger Marshall and Democrat Adam Hamilton November 3. He had previously run to represent Kansas in the US Senate in 2022, receiving 3 percent of the vote against Republican Jerry Moran and Democrat Mark R. Holland, who got  60 and 37 percent of the vote, respectively.  Graham has practiced law since 1985, He has been in private practice since 1987-04.  He says, “It’s a full-service law firm", though he focuses primarily on criminal defense and consumer defense. In 2024 he was an official write-in for the attorney of Marion County, Kansas. He told the Marion County Record that he planned to move from a suburb of Kansas City if elected. (He wasn't.) He had previously worked as a prosecutor in Neosho, Harper, and Dickinson Counties. As a prosecutor, he said he prefers diversion for first-time offenders and restorative justice, restitution to victims of their crime over incarceration, though not for domestic violence.   _______ Copyright 2026 Craig Lubow, and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Nolan Higdon and Spencer Graves discuss media literacy and why you should care. Higdon is a prolific author and media critic, previously interviewed 2026-05-29 for Radio Active Magazine.  Graves' key question is how to market media literacy?  Robin Andersen, interviewed for Radio Active Magazine 2026-03-27, noted that experts have been trying to promote media literacy for years -- decades -- without making rapid progress. Graves, Andersen, and Canyon collaborated in recent workshops on "How to expose media lies and have fun doing it". Graves suggested that we might make faster progress with media literacy with a clear, concise and compelling answer to the key Marketing question:      What's in it for me? for substantial portions of humanity. A moderated discussion of the issues raised in this interview is available in the companion “Media literacy and why you should care” on Wikiversity. Copyright 2026 Nolan Higdon and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

UMKC law professor Allen Rostron discusses the fall docket of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) and other issues with Radio Active Magazine regulars Craig Lubow and Spencer Graves. Rostron holds the Edward A. Smith Missouri Chair in Law, the Constitution and Society, in the UMKC School of Law, where he previously served as Associate Dean of Students. _______ Copyright 2026 Allen Rostron, Craig Lubow, and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Rachel Clark discusses the impact of news media on the Japanese political economy with Spencer Graves. Clark has been providing translation support for several years for speaking tours of Japan co-sponsored by Veterans for Peace and others. A moderated discussion of the issues raised in this interview is available in the companion “The impact of news media on the Japanese political economy” on Wikiversity. Copyright 2026 Rachel Clark and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Renée DiResta discusses what she recommends that individuals and groups, including governments, do to advance their interests considering the good and the evils of social media. Her comments are based primarily on research summarized in her 2024 book on Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, updated in 2026 with the addition of an epilogue. In November 2014, a month before a major measles outbreak began in Disneyland, DiResta was the mother of a 12-month-old studying data on vaccination rates in California. She was alarmed that vaccination rates had been falling. She wrote a blog post about that. Then she called her representative in the California state assembly and asked about the prospects for eliminating the personal-belief exemption from vaccination requirements for children in day care and schools in California. She was told that the anti-vaxxers were too strong. After the Disneyland outbreak, she called back and got a different answer: A representative who was an MD had introduced a bill "to eliminate the personal-belief exemption" to the requirement to vaccinate children entering pre-school and school. Vaccines are never 100% effective. Just over half of those infected from the Disneyland outbreak had been vaccinated, proving that        each unvaccinated human threatens everyone else, though the threats to the vaccinated are substantially less than to the unvaccinated. DiResta publicly supported the bill to eliminate the personal-belief exemption and drew the ire of leading anti-vaxxers, few of whom lived in California. That led to death threats, congressional subpoenas, lawsuits, and legal bills exceeding a million dollars. She soon figured out that most of the anti-vaccine comments came from out of state, some by bots. That work morphed into a job as the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory between 2019 and 2024 and then to her current position at Georgetown University. That work produced a 2022 report by The Virality Project with DiResta as lead editor that documents how anti-vaccine narratives on social media dramatically reduced the effectiveness of public health efforts. It also produced a 2024 report on "Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware", which she edited with Luke Hogg, and a 2025 report on "For Expertise to Matter, Nonpartisan Institutions Need New Communications Strategies", co-authored by Rachel Kleinfeld. DiResta is interviewed by Spencer Graves. Copyright 2026 Renée DiRista and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Two topics: First Reverend Randy Fikki of Unity Southeast Kansas City discusses how they provide shelter for houseless. Second, Linda Cortese and others discuss International Overdose Awareness Day, August 31.1  Resources from Today’s International Overdose Awareness Day Broadcast include: Get Smart About Drugs Fentanyl Free America | DEA.gov First Call KC 816-367-5900 24/7 Crisis Call line findhelp.org GRASP (Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing)- 816-361-5900 to register Safe.Pharmacy _______ See also "International Overdose Awareness Day (IOAD) Toolkit" on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/php/toolkits/ioad.html). Copyright: 2026 Randy Fikki, Linda Cortese, Emily Murray, Margaux Mueller, Seth Middleton, Dawn Owens, Andrew Burris, Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license

Teressa Wilke and Ann Suellentrop discuss their reactions to a workshop they attended on "How to expose media lies and have fun doing it" with Spencer Graves, who organized the workshop with Robin Andersen and Katerina Canyon. A moderated discussion of the issues raised in this interview is available in the companion “How to expose media lies and have fun doing it” on Wikiversity. Copyright 2026 Teressa Wilke, Ann Suellentrop, and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Yonty Friesem discusses media literacy education and the Media Education Lab, of which they are Executive Director. Friesem is an award-winning educator, scholar and filmmaker and an Associate Professor of Communication at Columbia College Chicago. The Media Education Lab is an online community working to advance digital and media literacy education through leadership development, scholarship, and community engagement. It was founded in 2003 by Renee Hobbs, then at Temple University. It has team members, faculty and graduate students in many different countries. A moderated discussion of the issues raised in this interview is available in the companion “Yonty Friesem on media education” on Wikiversity. Copyright 2026 Yonty Friesem and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Susan Schnall and Bryson Ripley discuss Veterans for Peace including their 2026 annual convention, August 6-9, in the UMKC student union. Schnall and Ripley are Presidents of the national Veterans for Peace organization and their Kansas City chapter, respectively. They are interviewed by Spencer Graves.  You do not have to be a veteran to join Veterans for Peace. They accept allies. The website of the national Veterans for Peace organization is veteransforpeace.org. That of the Kansas City chapter is vfpkc.org. The local has a hybrid meeting the first Saturday of each month at noon, currently at the Vietnam Veterans of America Hall, 3027 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO. For the Zoom link or with any questions, email [email protected]. Anyone is welcome to visit these meetings and decide later if they would like to join.  More information about this convention is available at the convention website vfpconvention.org, which can also be reached from veteransforpeace.org by clicking "Convention" (top right).  Or email [email protected].  Susan Schnall was court-martialed in 1969 for having had a leadership role in an antiwar demonstration while in uniform as a US Navy Lieutenant JG. She was convicted and sentenced to six months of hard labor, forfeiture of all pay and dismissal from the Navy.  Bryson Ripley joined the US Marine Corps in 2014 and spent five years as a "correction specialist" -- a military prison guard. He saw military personnel incarcerated for offenses he thought should not have resulted in prison time. His military experience contributed to a major change in worldview.  Ripley said he has suffered from "moral injury", from feeling extreme guilt from having done things that violate one's moral code. Some victims of moral injury suffer homelessness, addiction and domestic violence, though perhaps not at the same rates as those with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.  Schnall said that post-traumatic stress is real, but the disorder is with the society that send humans to war, not with the humans who suffer from  post-traumatic stress. The symptoms of post-traumatic stress include recurring nightmares about where they've been, the fact that they have faced life or death situations, or the harm that they perpetrated on other individuals, drug addiction, alcoholism, social violence, suicide, etc.  Shnall said that Veterans for Peace recently published a report1 on Agent Orange, a defoliant used to clear the jungle in Vietnam between 1962 and 1971 that is still contributing to birth defects today from residues sprayed over half a century ago. She also noted that humans are still killed today from bombs dropped sixty years ago that only now get detonated.  _______ VeteransForPeace.org > "Our Work" > "National Projects" > "Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign".  Copyright 2026 Susan Schnall, Bryson Ripley, Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Wyandotte County division 5 Judge Tony Martinez tells Craig Lubow why he thinks Wyandotte County Democratic voters should vote for him in the August 5 Democratic primary.  All registered candidates for that office were invited. Reginald Keith  (Reggie) Davis was not interviewed because of a scheduling mixup. Kayla Roehler was not available. Copyright: 2026 Public domain