Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials, from Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr to career public servants. He sowed public doubt in both agencies so successfully that when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he paid little political cost and, despite an unprecedented array of criminal indictments, easily won the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
Technology has colonized nearly every public and private space, and most of us spend more time staring at screens than at our fellow human beings. How has this changed us? What crucial human experiences have we undermined in our pursuit of lives of greater convenience and efficiency? What important human skills have deteriorated as we outsource more of our decision-making to technology?
The McCain Institute Washington Forum will convene global leaders, experts, and humanitarians for a daylong forum to identify solutions to the most pressing challenges impacting human and planetary health. The forum theme, “Democracy, Human Rights & Leadership in Action,” will highlight the McCain Institute’s work to counter rising authoritarianism, an erosion of democratic norms, growing violations of human rights, and a lack of principled, character-driven leadership at home and abroad.
“Strengthening Democracy with Media Literacy: A National Security Imperative,” hosted by the McCain Institute, brings together experts from media literacy, cybersecurity, and academia to discuss how media literacy interventions build resilience to misinformation threats and protect democracy.
The information age’s promise of accessible information has also seen the generation of a new threat to national security: misinformation. Join us on Wednesday, October 23 at 10 a.m. ET to explore the intersection of media literacy and national security.
The US – Mexico Kaleidoscope is a binational short film contest and festival that seeks to encourage and curate new narratives about the relationship between the United States and Mexico, and our two societies. The festival, organized by the Mexico Institute, Arizona State University, and the Universidad de Guadalajara, is uniquely binational, bringing together talented participants, jurors, and institutions from both countries.
In recent years, the sight of gun-wielding citizens patrolling ballot boxes and voting sites has become increasingly familiar. Major news corporations parroting false claims of election fraud, ballot stuffing, and faulty voting systems is the new normal. In an era of global anti-democratic movements, the sanctity of democratic electoral processes has become a major national security concern, and the need to protect elections from foreign interference, disinformation, voter intimidation, and the danger of election results being overturned, are now front and center. How did we get here?
Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many perils, from enabling human rights abuses to seeding future threats. Is it possible to work with such forces but mitigate some of these risks? In Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, Erica L. Gaston explores U.S.
As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in the spring of 1980, six heavily armed gunman barged into the Iranian embassy in London, taking twenty-six hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath. As police negotiators pressed the gunmen, rival protestors clashed violently outside the embassy, and as MI6 and the CIA scrambled for intelligence, Britain’s special forces strike team, the SAS, laid plans for a dangerous rescue mission.
The British Library is hosting a series of webinars focused on libraries and the climate crisis. The aim of the series is to bring together international library leaders to share their different responses to the climate emergency.
Orion Magazine and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination present a conversation between two leading authors of speculative writing—Victor LaValle and Carmen Maria Machado—to celebrate the launch of Orion’s most recent anthology, Unnatural Disasters.