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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
All across the world, citizens of liberal democracies are justifying their rejection of democratic norms and traditions as a protest against a cast of elite villains. It comes in different flavors around the world, but the underlying trend seems to be the same.
While most observers are focusing on the impact of globalization or the activities of these very elites, Tom Nichols is placing responsibility somewhere else: the citizens themselves. Tom Nichols is professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and the author of “The Death of Expertise,” and most recently, “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy.” He's also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion and has over half a million followers on Twitter, where he rages about everything from rock music, to Indian food, to national security. He sat down with David Priess for a wide-ranging conversation about democratic decline, its causes and effects, the tough process of looking in the mirror and related issues, from civil military affairs to the current Afghan crisis.
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The city of Kabul’s international airport has become the unlikely focal point of an unprecedented humanitarian effort as U.S. soldiers and diplomats seek to maintain control of their airport facility while facilitating the evacuation of thousands of Americans and foreign nationals, as well as at least some vulnerable Afghans. Meanwhile, on the outside, an improvised network of veterans, former diplomats, humanitarian workers and civil society groups has been desperately working to help vulnerable Afghans evade the Taliban, get into the airport and onto a flight to safety before it is too late.
Scott R. Anderson sat down with three people who have been closely involved in this latter effort: Susannah Cunningham of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Camille Mackler of the Truman Center for National Policy and the Immigrant Advocates Response Collaborative, and Chris Purdy of Human Rights First. They discussed what's happening on the ground at Kabul airport, what’s likely to come next for those who make it through and what the Biden administration needs to do to save more lives while there's still time.
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In October 2020, Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to two New York University researchers collecting data on the ads Facebook hosts on its platform, arguing that the researchers were breaching the company’s terms of service. The researchers disagreed and kept up with their work. On August 3, after months of failed negotiations, Facebook shut off access to their accounts—an aggressive move that journalists and scholars denounced as an effort by the company to shield itself from transparency.
For this week’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alex Abdo, the litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University (where, full disclosure, Evelyn will soon join as a senior research fellow). The Knight Institute is providing legal representation to the two NYU researchers, Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy—and Alex walked us through what exactly is happening here. Why did Facebook ban Edelson and McCoy’s accounts, and what does their research tool, Ad Observer, do? What’s the state of the law, and is there any merit to Facebook’s claims that its hands are tied? And what does this mean for the future of research and journalism on Facebook?
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Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson, whose nightly news show on Fox has become the most popular show in U.S. cable news history, traveled to Budapest to record a special version of his show. The centerpiece of his visit was an interview with Hungary's authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. But far from criticizing Orbán or questioning him on Hungary's increasing move away from liberal democracy, Carlson was all compliments, praising the fence that Hungary has built along its border and allowing Orbán to lash out against his critics at home and abroad.
Carlson is not the only one with kind words for Hungary's would-be strongman. In the past months, an increasing number of conservative media and intellectual elites have praised Hungary, as well as earlier models like Portugal under the post-World War II right-wing dictator António Salazar, for what they view as its willingness to use state power to fight for conservative social, cultural and religious values.
To discuss what this embrace of foreign authoritarianism means for the American conservative movement, Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, who has written about the right’s embrace of Orbánism and what it means for the future of American democracy.
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This past Sunday, Americans woke up to a new reality in the country of Afghanistan—the Afghan government that the United States and its allies have supported for the last two decades is gone. In its place is a resurgent Taliban, now firmly in control of nearly the entire country. Meanwhile, the U.S. presence has been reduced to Kabul’s international airport where soldiers and diplomats are working 24-7 to safely evacuate U.S. and allied personnel, U.S. and foreign civilians, and at least some vulnerable Afghans and their families, even as the rest of the country sits and waits to find out what life will be like under the new Taliban regime.
To discuss these unprecedented events, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Afghanistan policy experts Madiha Afzal of the Brookings Institution, Laurel Miller of the International Crisis Group and Jonathan Schroden of CNA. They discussed the state of play in Afghanistan, how we got here and what we should expect next.
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