John Ambrosio is a former associate professor of Social Foundations in the Department of Educational Studies at Ball State University. He received a Core Fulbright Scholar Program grant to teach and conduct research in the Faculty of Education at the University of the Free State in South Africa and authored the book Educational leadership for transformation and social justice: Narratives of change in South Africa. Dr. Ambrosio’s scholarship is primarily concerned with issues of equity and social justice in public education. His most recent article, Problematizing truth-telling in a post-truth world: Foucault, parrhesia, and the psycho-social subject, examines how truth-tellers and truth-telling can be cultivated, as a practical activity of self-improvement, in the context of post-truth politics in the United States. Email: jambrosio57 [at] gmail.com
by John Ambrosio Sometimes they say the quiet part out loud. In 2024, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which led Project 2025, said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that the United States is “in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”…
by John Ambrosio In 2001, Grover Norquist, the Republican anti-tax crusader, famously quipped in an interview that he did not want to abolish government, “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The radical shrinking of the federal government under…
by John Ambrosio In The End of Reading is Here, an essay recently published in the Atlantic, Rose Horowitch argues that the U.S. has become a post-literate society, one in which people still read, but are increasingly unable to think logically, abstractly, and analytically. That is, while people are able to decode words, they lack…
by John Ambrosio While it is a global phenomenon, people in the U.S., Europe, and other liberal democracies are living in the midst of a polycrisis, in a confluence of the intersecting and overlapping crises of rising authoritarianism and far-right populism, worsening climate and ecological disaster, the increasing likelihood of nuclear war, and the rapid…
by John Ambrosio In 1984 when Ronald Reagan was re-elected president of the United Staters I asked myself: how is this possible? How was it possible that an ignorant but affable B-rated actor who continually confused his role in Hollywood films with historical reality and his own experience, and whose mental capacity was clearly on…
by John Ambrosio On June 16, 1858 in his House Divided speech, Abraham Lincoln declared that the government “could not endure permanently as half slave and half free” and would eventually become “all one thing or all the other.” Addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention, he argued that the deep and intensifying division over slavery…
by John Ambrosio Liberals, progressives, and others who closely follow U.S. national politics often experience a sense of vertigo and disorientation, of being emotionally upended and mentally exhausted trying to untangle and refute the incessant barrage of lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories emanating from the White House. While Trump frequently makes outrageous and inflammatory remarks…
by John Ambrosio In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, drew on a paper written by the renowned Czech dissident, and later president, Václav Havel that discussed how totalitarian regimes, like the former Soviet Union, seek to control the population by providing individuals with…
by John Ambrosio In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine, Robert Reich, a progressive university teacher and prolific writer, who worked in three presidential administrations, including serving as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, commented that his views of conservatives had changed because of a close friendship with Alan Simpson, a former Republican…