OUR PICKS LAST WEEKThe US Has Entered a New Phase of Political Violence | What America Can Learn from Iran’s Failure | The Future of American Cybersecurity | Harvard Should Prepare to Move Abroad, and more

Published 28 June 2025

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

— RFK Jr.’s anti-vaxx foot soldiers on the march

— Violent Christian Nationalists

— Iran War’s potential downside

EXTREMISM

·  ‘Our Era of Violent Populism’: the US Has Entered a New Phase of Political Violence

·  Trump’s Mass Deportations Are Making Us More Vulnerable to Domestic Terrorism

·  As Mamdani Rises, Anti-Muslim Attacks Roll in from the Right 

·  Jewish Caucus Calls for Pentagon Accountability Over Kingsley Wilson’s Antisemitic Remarks

·  Europol Report Focusing on IT and Terrorism

·  Central Asian Fighters and Global Jihad 

·  Terrorism Means Something Different Now

·  Police Allege That Jair Bolsonaro Sanctioned a Spy Ring 

·  The Minnesota Shootings and the Dangerous Trend of Impersonating Law Enforcement

THE LONG VIEW

·  What America Can Learn from Iran’s Failure

·  RFK’s Loopy Approach to Vaccines Endangers Americans

·  Dismantling CDC’s Global Work is Dismantling Our First Line of Biodefense

·  It’s Time to Name Heat Waves Like We Do Hurricanes

·  The Future of American Cybersecurity

·  The Secret Ingredient to AI Dominance? Nuclear Power 

MORE PICKS

·  Harvard Should Prepare to Move Abroad 

·  Why Nuclear Power Is a Strategic Necessity: Lessons from the Strait of Hormuz

·  Microsoft Aided an Adversary’s AI Ambitions

·  ‘They’re Not Breathing’: Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls

·  AI Agents Are Getting Better at Writing Code—and Hacking It as Well

·  What Happened to the War Powers Act?

·  The Plan to Vaccinate All Americans, Despite RFK Jr.

·  Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard

·  Defining ‘Rebellion’ in 10 U.S.C.§ 12406 and the Insurrection Act

·  Why Are Hundreds of Data Brokers Not Registering with States?

·  Data Brokers Are a Killer’s Best Friend

·  Golden Dome to Expand Army’s Homeland Defense Role

·  Appeals Court Lets Trump Keep Control of California National Guard in L.A.

·  ICE Agent or Just Some Person?

·  Coordinating Civil Unrest Through Ground-Level Emergency Management Experience 

·  What the Drone Community Needs Now: A Call to Action for Counter-UAS Preparedness

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

“Some people believe that the term anti-vaxxer is a pejorative,” the physician Robert Malone wrote on June 9. “I do not — I view it as high praise.” “The term ‘anti-vaxxer,’” he continued, “it is not a slur, but a compliment.”

— Quoted in David Wallace-Wells’s article, New York Times, 18 June 2025 (on 11 June 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appointed Malone to the advisory board that steers America’s vaccine policy)

“The alleged Minnesota assassin was known as a ‘deeply religious’ Christian man. That should be an alarm bell for all of us.”

— Mona Charen, The Bulwark, 18 June 2025

“One thing I think that this attack signals is that there’s a big distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states in that you can do whatever you want to a non-nuclear state. It would be much harder if Iran actually had a nuclear program…. Once you get nuclear weapons, it’s really hard for anybody to come and overturn your regime…. And so there’s going to be all these long-run consequences that aren’t going to be necessarily so pretty, meaning that a lot of countries are going to see this as a signal that they need to get serious about their own separate nuclear deterrence.”

— Francis Fukuyama, interviewed by Yascha Mounk, Persuasion, 25 June 1925

EXTREMISM

‘Our Era of Violent Populism’: the US Has Entered a New Phase of Political Violence  (J. Oliver Conroy, Guardian)
“We are in a historically high period of American political violence,” Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told the Guardian. “I call it our ‘era of violent populism’. It’s been about 50 years since we’ve seen something like this. And the situation is getting worse.” He said the US is in a years-long stretch of political violence that started around the time of Donald Trump’s first election, with perpetrators coming from both the right and the left. Pape directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which studies terrorism and conflict. He noted in a recent piece in the New York Times that his research has found rising support among both left- and right-leaning Americans for the “use of force” to achieve political means.

Trump’s Mass Deportations Are Making Us More Vulnerable to Domestic Terrorism  (Will Selber, The Bulwark)
Law enforcement can only do so much at one.

As Mamdani Rises, Anti-Muslim Attacks Roll