Mary McCord - "Professional question asker"

11/24/21 • 27 min

In this episode of extremely, Oren Segal speaks with Mary McCord, Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) and a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Before her national security work or serving as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Mary attended journalism school, which she describes as a "pretty good precursor to law school because essentially you become a professional question asker when you are a journalist and that's in many ways what a lawyer is."

Despite describing herself as a glass half empty person, Mary provides examples of people in her life who “do the right thing in the right moment." She also talks to Oren about being part of the legal team representing the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

More on Mary's work: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/mary-mccord/

Stay engaged and follow along for more on Twitter at @OrenSegal @ADL and @PERIL_AU

More on Mary's work: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/mary-mccord/

Stay engaged and follow along for more on Twitter at @OrenSegal @ADL and @PERIL_AU

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Erroll Southers - “You should be the change that you’re looking for”

In this episode of extremely, Oren Segal speaks with Erroll Southers, Professor at USC and Director of the Safe Communities Institute. Erroll explains his pathway from being stopped by law enforcement growing up in small town New Jersey to the Santa Monica Police Department, counterterrorism with the FBI, and then academia.

Erroll credits a “incredible mentor” for the tough love that helped him keep moving forward in his career. Erroll also explains how compartmentalizing has helped him cope with the heaviness of extremism work – and not talking with people about politics and religion.

More on Erroll’s work here: https://priceschool.usc.edu/people/erroll-g-southers/

Stay engaged and follow along for more on Twitter at @OrenSegal @ADL and @PERIL_AU

Next Episode

Amy Cooter – “This is not exactly what you think it is”

In this episode of extremely, Oren Segal speaks with Amy Cooter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Vanderbilt University, about her ethnographic research on the militia movement in the U.S.

Amy, who has interviewed militia members directly and observed their training firsthand, is not “a stereotypical academic.” She says that while most militias “see themselves as fundamentally local,” that started to change when they “became more willing than they had been for a number of years to quite literally bump shoulders with more extreme groups at protests and at other events they thought captured” shared concerns.

Amy tells Oren she initially thought she was going to be a chemist but got bored with it and took a sociology class. She realized “people were more interesting to study because there’s always a bit of an unknown factor” and they are “not as controllable as something that we are putting in test tube and trying to figure out.”

More on Amy’s work: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/sociology/bio/?who=amy-cooter

Stay engaged and follow along for more on Twitter at @OrenSegal @ADL and @PERIL_AU