This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced major changes to what content is allowed on his company’s social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, scrapping the system of independent fact-checkers in favor of “community notes” from volunteer users. Zuckerberg also loosened moderation rules around offensive speech, which will allow hateful content targeting women, LGBTQ people and other groups. Meta’s changes have been widely interpreted as a gift to Donald Trump and other Republicans, who have long argued against the policing of hate speech and disinformation online. The company has also donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and recently added Trump ally Dana White, the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, to its corporate board — part of a larger shift in Silicon Valley toward Trump and his MAGA movement. For more on these changes, we speak with media scholars Siva Vaidhyanathan and Marc Owen Jones, as well as Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, whose media company Rappler has been at the forefront of battling disinformation and hate speech on social media. “As of last year, 71% of the world is under authoritarian rule. We are electing illiberal leaders democratically, partly because our public information ecosystem … is corrupting our individual communications with each other,” says Ressa.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
-
As the remains of Jimmy Carter arrive in Washington, D.C., as part of a weeklong state funeral, we speak with historian Greg Grandin about the former U.S. president’s legacy. Carter, who served a single term from 1977 to 1981, promised to restore faith in government after the twin traumas of Watergate and the Vietnam War and to reorient U.S. foreign policy toward upholding human rights. “He came to power promising … a new kind of doctrine, that the United States was moving away from both the ideological excess and the support for dictatorships that led to wars like Vietnam or coups in Chile,” says Grandin. “Pretty quickly, events got ahead of him.” Carter’s “mixed and confused” legacy was nowhere more apparent than in Latin America, where he moved to limit aid to some right-wing dictatorships while supporting others, especially in Central America. He also began funding the mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan, which ultimately led to the Taliban and the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda. “For all of his decency and humanity, especially compared to the … clown circus that we’re living under now, we have to look at the more unfortunate legacies of Carter’s administration,” says Grandin.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joshua Kaplan about his latest blockbuster article for ProPublica chronicling the rise of a “freelance vigilante” through the ranks of the right-wing militia movement in an effort to surveil and disrupt their operations. Kaplan’s source, a wilderness survival trainer named John Williams, says he went undercover after being shocked by the January 6 insurrection, when members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other armed right-wing groups led the riot at the U.S. Capitol. “He’s an extraordinarily talented liar,” Kaplan says of Williams. “These militia guys loved him.” Williams would eventually gain the trust of senior leaders in Utah and beyond, collecting information that revealed a sprawling extremist movement with connections to law enforcement, lawmakers and more. Kaplan says Williams’s infiltration revealed the militia movement is surging across the country, despite the failed 2021 insurrection. Now with Donald Trump promising to pardon many of the Capitol riot participants, this same movement appears set to expand even further over the next few years. “The ramifications could be massive,” says Kaplan. “They have the potential to trigger a renaissance for militant extremists.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
We look at what we know about two deadly incidents that unfolded in the United States on New Year’s Day: a truck attack in New Orleans in which a driver killed at least 14 people before being shot dead by police, and the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, part of an apparent suicide. The FBI has identified the New Orleans suspect as 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who had posted videos to social media before the attack pledging allegiance to the Islamic State militant group. In the Las Vegas case, the driver was 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger of Colorado, an active-duty Army Green Beret, who is believed to have shot himself before the blast. Investigators say they have not found a link between the two incidents despite both men being connected to the military, but Army veteran and antiwar organizer Mike Prysner says “military service is now the number one predictor of becoming what is called a mass casualty offender, surpassing even mental health issues.” Prysner says the U.S. military depends on social problems like alienation and inequality in order to gain new recruits, then “spits them back out” in often worse shape, with people exposed to violence sometimes turning to extremism. “We have these deep-rooted problems in our society that give rise to these incidents of mass violence. Service members and veterans … can actually be a part of changing society and getting to the root of those issues and moving society forward,” he says, citing uniformed resistance to the Vietnam and Iraq wars as examples.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
More than 3,100 Indigenous students died at boarding schools in the United States between 1828 and 1970 — three times the number of deaths reported earlier this year by the Department of Interior, according to a new investigation by The Washington Post. Many of the students had been forcibly removed from their families and tribes as part of a government policy of cultural eradication and assimilation. The new report was led by Dana Hedgpeth, an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe of North Carolina, and expanded its reach beyond federal records to achieve a full public accounting of the death toll of what many scholars and survivors have described as “prison camps,” not schools. Hedgpeth shares how some tribes have now been able to recover the remains of children who had been buried at the boarding schools and return them for traditional burials in their ancestral homelands. “The impact of these schools is still being felt in many ways,” she says.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
After a 15-year career in the Foreign Service, Michael Casey resigned from the State Department in July over U.S. policy on Gaza and is now speaking out publicly for the first time. He was deputy political counselor at the United States Office for Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem for four years before he left. Casey says he resigned after “getting no action from Washington” for his recommendations on humanitarian actions for Palestinians and toward a workable two-state solution. “We don’t believe Palestinian sources of information,” Casey says about U.S. policymakers. “We will accept the Israeli narrative over all others, even if we know it’s not correct.” He also discusses what to expect for Gaza under the incoming Trump administration.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.