Good morning, Rulers! Happy panda diplomacy week to all those who celebrate. I live just a few blocks away from the Smithsonian National Zoo and look forward to meeting my fluffy new neighbors as soon as possible. Until then, let’s get into it: Sharon McMahon — AKA “America’s Government Teacher” — spent lockdown as many of us did — cooped up inside, scrolling on her phone. What she saw was a concerning rise of online commentary devoid of facts, and as a former high school teacher, the spiral of conversations without factual foundations nagged at her. So she began posting educational Instagram videos for an expanding digital classroom on topics related to U.S. history, politics and government. McMahon’s disarmingly informal and inquisitive style (and delightful Minnesota accent) soon attracted a following. Like any good teacher, she’s not in the business of holding forth on her personal opinions — she just wants to understand and explain the processes and players involved in the U.S. government, and she wants to take her viewers along with her. Today, McMahon’s Instagram account has over 1 million followers, supplemented by a successful podcast, “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting.” The journalist/historian Isabel Wilkerson, author of “The Warmth of Other Suns,” calls McMahon “a national treasure and a one-woman cavalry for truth.” In an election cycle crowded with misinformation, McMahon cut through the noise to give her audience front-row seats to conversations with both Vice President Kamala Harris — before Harris became the Democratic nominee — and later, Harris' vice presidential pick, Tim Walz. (Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance reportedly didn’t respond to her requests for an interview.) Her New York Times bestseller, “The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement,” chronicles seldom-heard stories of figures like Gouverneur Morris, the author of the preamble to the U.S. constitution; and Clara Brown , a formerly enslaved woman who became an entrepreneur and philanthropist. McMahon’s message to her readers: no matter how few resources they may have at their disposal, actions they choose to take — no matter how small — can have a mighty impact. I sat down with McMahon to discuss the importance of facts in a media environment clogged with misinformation, and the value of a multi-dimensional understanding of history in order to better shape the future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Ewing: What inspired you to kickstart your online project? Was there a need that you were responding to? McMahon: During 2020 there was … a bit of misinformation circulating on the interwebs. There were a lot of people who were just really confidently wrong on the internet, all day, every day. And we were all sitting at home doing nothing but watching “Tiger King” and “Love is Blind” and arguing with strangers. There was one specific moment where a man commented on one of my female friend's posts telling her that you could graduate from the electoral college, get a degree from it, and that there was an electoral college building near the White House. And I was like, “That is wrong, and that’s not a matter of opinion.” So I decided in that moment that I could either reply back to him and correct his incorrectness or I could make a little fact-based explainer video about how it actually worked … and then maybe that will live longer than my one Facebook comment. Ewing: Do you get ideas for your next video, your next podcast, by seeing the discourse that's unfolding in the comment section? McMahon: I use a question box in my Instagram stories with the question: “How can I help?” And I will get thousands of questions. That allows me to really quickly and easily gauge, “Where are people confused? Why do I have 300 questions about this thing? What are people not understanding?” That is a very helpful tool for me to be able to ascertain where people are sort of feeling stuck. It's the same as in a classroom: You can look around the room and see where people look lost and understand, “I need to explain this another time.” Ewing: What are some of the trends that you’re seeing as people respond? McMahon: What people have been asking me about this week is about tariffs. Tariffs have been in the news a lot because they're part of [former President Donald] Trump 's economic plans. He has done a lot of interviews recently, like with the Economic Club in Chicago, where he got into it with the editor of Bloomberg about tariffs — the Bloomberg editor is like, “But tariffs raise prices, that increases inflation.” Trump has a different perspective that — he said something to the effect of, “tariff is a beautiful word.” People are like, “What is a tariff?” Over the last couple of weeks, there's been a lot of questions about “How does FEMA work? Is FEMA giving money to help illegal immigrants?” So a lot of it is very cyclical based on what's happening in the news. Ewing: Do you have a sense of what the demographic makeup is of your community? McMahon: According to Instagram Insights it's about 90 percent women. And it's always been that way. The biggest bar on the bar graph of demographics is women ages 35 to 44. The largest user group of Instagram is millennial women, and the largest user group of my platform is millennial women. I don’t know why there aren't more men. That's something that I have questioned. Is it latent sexism? Or “I wanna get my political news from other dudes”? I don't know the answer to that question. Ewing: That, to me, speaks to how siloed we've become, especially with the rise of disinformation and misinformation. Do you feel like there's hope for going in a different direction or for combating these latent divisions? McMahon: So here's the thing. Hope to me is not a feeling. And thus too many people would give the answer of, “No, I don't feel hopeful. Have you heard the news? What is there to be hopeful about?” So I don't sit around waiting to feel hopeful. Hope is a choice that we make. Our ancestors throughout history, the people in my book — the people we would look to like, “Dang, Martin Luther King really moved the needle” — he did not wait for his set of external circumstances to align, to have a green arrow pointing toward a hopeful outcome. Hope was something that he chose because he knew that good things grow from the fertile soil of hope. So when people ask me, “Are you hopeful?” The answer is yes. And that is because that is a choice that I make, because I know that is from where good things can come. What is the other option? To just be cynical and hopeless and to just let things go downward into a death spiral? Listen, I can't fix it all. But I'll be darned if I can't try my hardest to do something. Ewing: There's a school of thought that argues history is a lesson to lead the way looking into the future. Do you think we have forgotten that self-reflection? McMahon: I think it's very mixed. There are a lot of people who are like people in my community who are extremely eager to learn. Then there's also a movement afoot to recast history as a time of idealistic heroes and to swipe over anything that makes people of a certain community feel uncomfortable. And I do think that there is somewhat of a disturbing trend in certain groups to ensure the comfort and safety of children in classrooms, but what that is really doing is two things. Number one, it's depriving us of lessons from history. Number two, it is squashing the ability of people of the future, today's children, tomorrow's citizens, to learn critical thinking skills. You cannot learn to think critically without being confronted with information that you disagree with. Otherwise, that's literally the definition of indoctrination: I only consume information I agree with. Also there’s the idea that children can't learn that two things are true at once. That George Washington was the first president and contributed a lot to the development of our understanding of leadership and what it means to have a peaceful transfer of power, and additionally, he was an enslaver. Both of these things can be true — we do not need to view him in a one dimensional caricature, and that's true of all people. When we insist on viewing people as one dimensional, we deprive them of their humanity. It disincentivizes people from trying to do good in the world when we can't examine people for both their flaws and their contributions.
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