Tag: state governments
Good Luck Fighting Disinformation – The Atlantic
In April 2022, Nick Sawyer sat down before a committee of the California State Assembly to argue for legislation to help limit the spread of COVID falsehoods. Sawyer, an emergency-room physician, had become frustrated by what he saw as the failure of his profession to respond to doctors sharing false information about the pandemic. He’d co-founded an advocacy group, No License for Disinformation (NLFD), and now he was testifying in favor of legislation that warned doctors of professional consequences for
The Real Problem With American Universities
Updated at 7:33 p.m. ET on January 30, 2024
Just about everyone in America seems to be angry at higher education. Congress is angry. State governments are angry. Donors are angry. Parents are angry because schools are so expensive, and students are angry because they aren’t getting what they paid for. Just 36 percent of Americans now tell pollsters that they have significant confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent less than a decade ago.
Elite schools in particular
The Real Weaponization of the DOJ
In January, one of the first acts of the new Republican House majority was to establish a special subcommittee devoted to rooting out the ways the FBI and other federal bodies have supposedly been used as tools of political persecution.
“We have a duty to get into these agencies and look at how they have been weaponized to go against the very people they’re supposed to represent,” said Representative Jim Jordan, the Trump ally who chairs the body. Even less
A Brazen, Dead-Serious Attack on American Democracy
More than two and a half years after Donald Trump attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., has indicted the former president on four felony counts related to the plot.
This is the third time that Trump has been charged with felonies in 2023, but it is also the most significant case against him. Although other charges allege serious misconduct, this cuts to the gravest act he committed: his lengthy, concerted effort to subvert
Moore v. Harper Could Derail America’s Democracy
In just a few days, on December 7, the Supreme Court will consider a case that could have dire implications for American democracy, Moore v. Harper.
Moore concerns the “independent state legislature” theory: the idea that the Constitution grants state legislatures some level of special authority in administering federal elections that may not be constrained by state courts or perhaps even state constitutions. The idea is, to put it mildly, contested. The conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig, who recently
Elon Musk Is Right About Free Speech on Twitter
Elon Musk, in his effort to buy Twitter, signaled that under his ownership, the company would allow all speech that the First Amendment protects. “By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” he tweeted on April 26. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
Many commentators were quick to point out that, as a private company, Twitter is not required to follow the First Amendment, which applies only to federal and state governments.
Vaccinating Kids Has Never Been Easy
In September 1957—two years after church bells rang in celebration of the new polio vaccine, two years after people rejoiced in the streets, two years after Americans began lining up for their shots—the proportion of children fully vaccinated against polio remained at about 50 percent.
Supply was not the problem. Nor were doubts about the vaccine’s safety or efficacy, concluded a report from around that time by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes,
Pennsylvania Hopes to Stop an Insider Election Threat
The people who fear the most for the future of American democracy weren’t watching the election returns in Virginia and New Jersey earlier this month for clues about next year’s midterms. These voting-rights advocates didn’t pay much attention to who won mayoral or school-board races. Instead, they’ve spent the past two weeks trying to discern how many Donald Trump loyalists captured control of elections in a pivotal 2024 swing state: Pennsylvania.
Voters across the Keystone State decided who will
The Rise of the Disneyfied Public University
Weeks into his freshman year at the Marion Military Institute, a public two-year college in Alabama, Thomas was bored. The campus, in the sleepy, hard-luck town of Marion, lacked the glitzy amenities of modern-day universities. To escape the institute’s starchy military uniforms and rigid schedule, Thomas would jump in his truck on weekends and head to Tuscaloosa, home of the University of Alabama.
The University of Alabama had a meticulously groomed campus and stately redbrick buildings whose white colonnades
The Biologists Stranded on an Erupting Alaskan Volcano
On the evening of August 6, 2008, on a remote island in Alaska’s Aleutian chain, the side of a volcano began crumbling into the turquoise waters of its crater lake. Gulls fled from the falling rock. The wind whistled around Chris Ford as he peered over the lip of the crater. “It’s starting to get tumbling down pretty good,” he shouted into his radio.
Ford had climbed up the volcano’s steep slope to get a bird’s-eye view of the small